The Generalitat’s offensive to make Catalan official in the EU has a new initiative since this Friday: an advertising campaign in the 24 languages that are already official currently in the Union and with a presence in the 27 member states. ‘If all languages are exceptional, let none be an exception in Europe’ is the motto of the campaign, which will be present at the public roadin the media and in Internet.
The objective of this new proposal is none other than to make this demand known and seek institutional supports and citizen sympathies. “We want European citizens to know the demand for the official status of Catalan in Europe and to live it positively and with empathy,” said the Minister of Foreign Action at the presentation event, Meritxell Serret. The first advertisement has been installed in Brussels on the metro screens at the Schuman, Arts Lois and Trône stops, the reference ones to go to European Parliament already the Commission.
To facilitate its dissemination, the Government has given away campaign rights. That is, all institutions that wish to do so can disseminate it by attaching their logo to it if they wish. What Serret did not want to say is how much public money this major advertising impact has cost. He has assured that he leaves the budget your department and has promised to give the figure when all the contracts to disseminate it have been completed.
The Generalitat hopes to see its message reflected at least in the streets of Paris, Strasbourg, Rome, Dublin and Berlin and in dozens of newspapers such as the newspaper ‘The Irish Times’, the Swedish ‘Dagens Nyheter’, the Portuguese ‘Expresso’, the Cypriot ‘Reporter’, the Polish ‘Wprost’ or the Bulgarian ‘Vesti’. Finally, you now have a web domain where you can consult it everyone. What the campaign wants to be, in short, is “a defense and praise of all languages” to end up generating sympathies to one of them, the Catalan one.
Although this is the Generalitat campaign on this most powerful topic to date, it is not the first. In September, he already launched another simultaneous publication in 15 European media of an article in which he defended the official status of Catalan for reasons of “linguistic equality.” The Government has intensified its actions on the issue in the last month, also to institutional level with contacts with consuls, ambassadors and those responsible for the foreign policy of the member states.
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The campaign is presented with an eye toward next Tuesday, when the General Affairs Council of the European Union with the debate on the official status of Catalan on the table. Serret has shown himself optimistic with the Catalan language ending up being officially recognized, even if it is not in this event next week. The ‘counsellor’ admits that there are “doubts, fears and questions” in some member states, but adds that for now they have not seen any “veto” by anyone.
The doubts of the countries are so much “politics” as “legal”Serret continued, hence the battle is not even remotely won. But the Generalitat assures that it maintains “the maximum ambition and the maximum demand”. He also acknowledges that the Government is making its own moves to achieve the ultimate goal.