Catalan is spoken as a native language by more people in the European Union than English, for example. Nevertheless, it has not yet been granted official EU language status. Although the Kingdom of Spain is currently campaigning to have Catalan, Galician and Basque recognised as official languages of the European Union, Alberto Núñez Feijoo, leader of the Spanish opposition party Partido Popular, is attempting to thwart this by intervening with various member states. If the Spanish minority government led by Pedro Sánchez fails to deliver on its promise regarding Catalan, this is likely to lead to the fall of the social democratic government in Spain. This could be one of the reasons why the German federal government has so far clearly opposed the Spanish and Catalan demand to make Catalan an official language of the EU, even though Spain is prepared to bear all the associated costs alone.
Germany bears a decisive share of responsibility for the victory of the insurgent fascists in the Spanish Civil War, which led to mass murders, the establishment of a murderous fascist regime and decades of oppression of the Catalan language and culture, which was deliberately ignored in Germany until the dictator's death in 1975. Although the German people exercised their collective human right to self-determination in 1990 and reunified on this basis, Germany has so far failed to recognise the inalienable and unrestricted collective human right of the Catalan people to self-determination. The fact that Germany, together with Italy, has so far blocked the legitimate desire of the Catalan people and the Spanish state to elevate Catalan to the status of an official EU language shows once again that Germany has not learned the lessons it should have learned from its past. The treatment of Catalan-speaking EU citizens in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, the Valencian Community, Aragon, France and Italy as ‘second-class EU citizens’ is a disgrace to the European Union, which promotes values to the outside world with double standards and demands that other states adhere to values that it itself does not fully uphold within its own borders.
Catalonia is one of the most prosperous and innovative regions of the European Union. While the European Union continues to give the Catalan people the cold shoulder and make Catalan speakers in several countries feel that they are being discriminated against by the EU on linguistic grounds, the German company DeepL, arguably one of the most innovative companies in the European Union, has recognised the signs of the times and is expected to add Catalan to the list of languages it offers for machine translation by the end of 2025.