Vox imposes restrictions on the native language of Valencia and the Balearic Islands

Vox has managed, with varying success, to advance its cultural and linguistic offensive in the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands. The PP's need for the support of the far right to push through its 2025 budget has allowed Abascal's party to impose its approach to weakening the country's own language in the negotiations, more so in the Valencian region than in the Balearic Islands. This is especially true in the education system, the administration, the publishing sector, and social promotion of its use. This "culture war" has encountered little opposition in the case of Carlos Mazón, who has been widely criticized for his handling of the Dana language, and in which Marga Prohens has resisted despite already making some concessions to the far right .

The Valencian case is paradigmatic. The Valencian Academy of Language (AVL), a regulatory and statutory body created by Eduardo Zaplana's People's Party (PP) and unanimously supported, has suffered a cut in its activities budget (purchase of goods, investments and transfers to entities and associations, promotion of language and reading) from €1.2 million to €133,000. The Vox ombudsman in the Valencian Parliament has even declared that "we want to strangle it." The AVL has submitted a report to the Valencian Parliament warning that these cuts "will make the very existence of the institution unviable."

Vox has forced the PP to defund the Valencian Language Academy, created by Zaplana.

But there are more examples. The drastic cuts have affected Valencian-language publishers like Bromera, foundations like Full (dedicated to promoting the reading of books in Valencian), and a half-million-euro reduction has been applied to the promotion of Valencian. In an interview with this newspaper, the regional minister of Education and Culture, José Antonio Rovira, justified these cuts by stating that "we will not give money to entities that Catalonia funds in favor of Països Catalans." At the same time, the 2025 Valencian budget increases aid to secessionist entities, opposed to the unity of Catalan and Valencian, such as Lo Rat Penat or the Royal Academy of Valencian Culture, and to entities promoting bullfighting.

In the case of the Balearic Islands, the pact Marga Prohens signed with Vox to secure her election as president was linguistically ambiguous enough to satisfy both parties, but this ambiguity is the cause of most of the clashes the two parties have had during the legislature. The latest disagreement ended with a victory for Prohens, but with significant concessions in the far-right party's narrative: Vox will support the budget in exchange for amending the Education Law to make Spanish, not just Catalan, the primary language in classrooms, and on the condition that island linguistic modalities are promoted.

The concessions are far from the demands of the extremists, who called for the repeal of the Language Normalization Law and the decree mandating that 50% of subjects be taught in Catalan. Their obsession is to separate students by language, with schools or classrooms entirely in Spanish or Catalan.

The agreement has inflamed tensions among the opposition, the education sector, and Catalan-language advocacy organizations on the islands, who have revived the green T-shirts, a symbol of opposition to the language policies of former Balearic president José Ramón Bauzá. The former president, who later served as a member of the European Parliament for Ciudadanos (Cs), passed an education law based on trilingualism between Spanish, Catalan, and English, which, in practice, undermined the requirement that at least 50% of subjects be taught in Catalan. These measures sparked the largest demonstration in the history of the Balearic Islands, with 100,000 people taking to the streets.

In the Balearic Islands, Vox forces Prohens to modify the Education Law to benefit Spanish in schools.

The concessions Prohens has made to the ultras are much less significant than those approved by Bauzá, but the Balearic president already had to confront a group of activists wearing green T-shirts a few days ago at an event with the writer Carme Riera, who criticized her for this new subservience to Vox. Prohens began her term by eliminating the requirement for Catalan in healthcare among the medical community.

From then on, the rest of the language measures adopted have been at Vox's request, albeit reluctantly. It launched a voluntary pilot plan for free language choice, which has been a failure because only half a dozen schools have signed up.

Read also Prohens saves the budget with concessions to Vox on language and memory issues Nekane Domblás

In September, the process of amending the education law and making Catalan the primary language will begin, a measure with no practical consequences. The PP says they've reached this point in their concessions and, with the approved budget, they consider the entire legislature saved.