Europe | Spain

Bust-up in Catalonia

|BARCELONA

A ROW over language has put a 20-year marriage between Catalonia's two main nationalist parties on the rocks. There is even talk of infidelity. The junior partner, it is whispered, may be thinking of shacking up with Spain's ruling People's Party instead. The result is that relations between Spain's prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, and Catalonia's regional president and head of the Catalans' biggest nationalist party, Jordi Pujol, are strained. That matters, because Mr Pujol keeps Mr Aznar's minority government in power in Madrid.

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