They say English is the European Union’s lingua franca these days, and for better or worse it probably is. But a knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese turns out to be very handy as well.

At the EU’s Lisbon summit on approving the long-awaited institutional reform treaty, Luís Amado, Portugal’s foreign minister, emerged late in the evening to update the press on the progress that EU leaders were making.

Transfixed no doubt by his immaculately trimmed beard and equally immaculate English (one could imagine him in a 19th century group portrait with Lev Tolstoy and Karl Marx), none of the assembled hacks
and hackettes paid much attention when a reporter asked Amado a question in Portuguese - all the others he answered were put in English.

Was it true, the reporter asked Amado, that one of the main obstacles blocking approval of the treaty would disappear because Italy would be offered an extra seat in the European parliament and the parliament’s president would give up his voting rights? She added that she had picked this up at a Spanish press briefing.

Smooth as ever, Amado answered that this was one of the things that the leaders were looking at. But once again few of those present bothered to listen to him because he was speaking Portuguese.

And yet it turned out that the Portuguese-speaking reporter was absolutely right - as Amado was probably well aware.

So there are two lessons here for all of us. One is to brush up on the language of the country that holds the six-month rotating EU presidency (from January, eh-hem, it’s Slovenia). The other is to attend Spanish press briefings. Olé!

October 19th, 2007 in Constitution, Language, Summits | Permalink