Spain Notes, Sept 19: women's football + multilingual politics
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1/ FOOTBALL: The new Spain women’s manager, Montse Tomé, who was Vilda’s sidekick, called up a bunch of female players to get ready for Nations League matches against Sweden and Switzerland.
2/ Tomé swore blind at a press conference that she had spoken to the players beforehand…and the RFEF said everyone was now on the same page.
3/ The players disagreed…latest reports say 15 out of the 23 female players on the new list are not going…and Jenni Hermoso was not included…to protect her in the current situation, said Tomé.
4/ Hermoso issued a statement on Tuesday morning: protect me from what? How can the environment now be safe for her team mates but not for her?
5/ Putellas said the ladies had not wanted to be called up and had been clear about that, both in their public statement and in talks with RFEF people.
6/ Swedish player Filippa Angeldahl said they would support the Spanish girls boycotting the match: “They should feel all the support around them, other countries support them in the decision they choose to make. If they feel that they need to draw a boycott for something to happen, it is clear that we support them”.
7/ POLITICS: the big story today is that Congress is getting ready for a first chaotic multilingual parliamentary session, after the new Speaker, Armengol (PSOE), immediately ruled on being appointed in August, at that vote that proved Feijóo (PP) doesn’t have the support to become PM, that MPs would be able to speak in Catalan, Basque or Galician as well as Spanish.
8/ Latest reports say the move, to please regional nationalists as Sánchez (PSOE) strives to be reappointed PM, is costing up to €280,000.
9/ Media in Madrid and Barcelona are even live-blogging the moment…
10/ The PP and Vox are against the measure, as you might imagine: the whole point of a common language is that, well, everybody already speaks and understand it, they argue, and MPs will continue to speak in Spanish off-screen in private conversations in the corridors of parliamentary power.
11/ The session begins at 12 p.m. if you want to watch the fun, and Congress is now going to broadcast two livestreams: the multilingual one and the translated-into-Spanish version.