The Basque Parliament will launch this Monday the committee responsible for analyzing the amendments registered to the two bills from PNV and EH Bildu to modify the Public Employment Law and the "shielding" of Basque.
This working group, chaired by the jeltzale Olatz Peón, will be constituted within the Commission of Institutions, Public Governance and Security. From the opening of the committee, the groups will begin to examine and debate the amendments proposed to both legislative initiatives.
The process will culminate with the drafting of the committee's report, which will be debated and voted on first in committee and, subsequently, in the plenary session. According to parliamentary sources cited by Europa Press, the intention is to accelerate the timeline so that the plenary vote can be held before the end of the current political term.
The deadline for registering amendments ended on April 30. The PNV presented three modifications to its own text with the aim of reinforcing legal certainty regarding the requirements for knowledge of Basque in public employment calls in Euskadi.
The jeltzale party argued that public administrations should have the possibility to create positions with a linguistic profile whose requirement is delayed in time. Thus, it would be allowed to access these positions without initially proving the linguistic profile, granting a period to obtain it, with the commitment that the administration itself will provide the necessary training.
EH Bildu registered a total of six amendments to the two bills (four to its own and two to the PNV's) with the intention of establishing as a general principle that knowledge of the two official languages be mandatory to access public employment, and to introduce the index of progressivity, so that, by modifying article 187 of the Public Employment Law, it is determined in which positions the requirement of Basque can be postponed.
The PSE-EE, for its part, presented an amendment in which it advocates for maintaining in the law the Mandatory Compliance Indices that set the linguistic profiles in the Administration, except in administrations located in the 'arnasgunes', where the use of Basque exceeds 80%, which could be excluded from general application.
The PP was the group that submitted the most amendments, with a total of 38. Among other issues, it proposes limiting the percentage of positions with the Basque language requirement in the OPE to a maximum of 50% and rejects that a linguistic profile should be assigned to all positions, according to its proposed modifications to the Public Employment Law.
Open conversations between PNV and EH Bildu
The constitution of the committee will take place while contacts between PNV and EH Bildu on this legal reform remain active. Both parties have 27 seats each, so if they do not reach an understanding, they risk their respective bills being rejected.
After the failure of the negotiation between the PNV and its Government partner, the PSE-EE, to reach an agreement that would guarantee the approval of its proposal in the Chamber, the jeltzales held their first formal meeting with EH Bildu in the Basque Parliament on May 21, despite acknowledging "the difficulty" of reaching an agreement. In that meeting, the PNV proposed to the sovereignist coalition the possibility of abstaining to allow its bill to move forward.