Carles Puigdemont’s commitment
The president-in-exile and candidate of Junts+ for the presidency of the Generalitat, Carles Puigdemont, has presented his proposal to deal with the worrying situation facing Catalan and has pledged to carry out a linguistic reform if it is elected president after the parliamentary elections this Sunday, May 12. The aim of this reform is to ensure the rights of Catalan speakers in Catalonia, as they are currently not guaranteed. Puigdemont has emphasized that he wants this legislature to be that of the language and has stressed the importance of being Catalan in order to speak Catalan or to have the will to learn and understand it, regardless of the origin, name, color or religion of each person.
The need to refound principles
Puigdemont considers that it is necessary to refound many principles of the bases that have sustained the legal structure of the Catalan language. Currently, there are many rights of Catalan speakers that are not guaranteed in Catalonia, where the own language, according to the law, is Catalan. The president regrets the increasingly reduced social use of the language, the breach of its vehicularity at school and its degradation. He also expresses his concern about the decrease in the use of Catalan in the public media. In this sense, Puigdemont defends the language immersion model, as he believes it works. Likewise, he urges to recover the origins of the struggle for Catalan as a social struggle and regrets the departure from this tradition by the current PSC.
The Junts+ program
The Junts+ program for the next legislature emphasizes the recovery of the social use of Catalan. One of the outstanding measures is the redefinition of the language immersion model, which they consider fundamental for the social cohesion of Catalonia. Junts+ proposes to update and control the application of this model. It also wants to facilitate the learning of Catalan in the workplace through cooperation between the Generalitat and the private company, which will have to train its workers during working hours. Other proposals include the establishment of language clauses in public procurement and in projects in which the Generalitat collaborates, as well as strengthening the presence of Catalan in the digital environment and in artificial intelligence.