With the ghost of ETA hovering over the end of the electoral campaign, almost two million Basques will elect this Sunday the next “lehendakari”, the Basque name used to designate the regional president, who will govern the Basque Country for the next four years. .
Nobody doubts that
the party with the most votes will be a nationalist force
. In the 12 democratic regional elections that were held in Euskadi (Basque Country), the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) was, until now, the first in number of votes, a scenario that this Sunday could not be repeated.
The most novel result of these regional elections could be, according to the latest polls, that
the most radical nationalist party, Euskal Herria Bildu - former political arm of the terrorist organization ETA - wins the most votes.
Bildu is a coalition of left-wing forces that debuted in a Basque election in 2012.
“For the first time, the party that supported and supported the terrorist organization ETA a few years ago, an organization that no longer exists, can win the elections,” estimates Basque journalist Gorka Landaburu in a talk with
Clarín
.
Landaburu is the former director of the publication
Cambio16
and was the victim of an ETA attack. In 2001 he received a letter bomb that mutilated him, left him blind in one eye and lost part of his hearing.
For more than half a century, ETA, initials of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Euskadi free), committed more than three thousand attacks: 853 murders, 2,000 wounded, 84 kidnappings and more than 300 crimes that were never clarified.
In 2011 ETA announced the end of its armed struggle and seven years later, in 2018, the end of its trajectory, its dissolution.
“The violence of terrorism ended 12 years ago and we are in a new stage that corresponds with a generational change in Basque politics that has always been dominated by the PNV, a moderate nationalist, center-right party that has governed since the beginning of the transition. democratic, accompanied by the Socialist Party of the Basque Country,” states the Basque political board Landaburu.
The curious thing is that, for this April 21,
the polls show a technical tie
between the PNV and Bildu or a slight advantage in favor of the “abertzales”, which in Basque means “patriot” and is how radical nationalists are known. .
According to data from the consulting firm 40dB that were published by the newspaper
El País
and Cadena SER radio, EH Bildu would obtain 30 seats in Parliament and the PNV, 28. The Basque socialists would obtain 10 seats, the PP, 6 and Vox would manage to maintain the foot he set foot in Parliament for the first time in the elections four years ago. Podemos and Sumar, however, would not achieve parliamentary representation.
He who wins does not always rule
However, it is unlikely that Bildu will be able to form a government.
The Basque Parliament is made up of 75 deputies who will elect the head of the regional government. To achieve this, the party with the most votes would have to obtain 38 parliamentary seats and thus achieve the absolute majority that would make its candidate lehendakari.
In the 12 previous Legislatures, the PNV was able to retain the government with the support of the Basque Socialist Party.
The projections for this Sunday predict that, although Bildu obtains more votes than the PNV, it will not be able to achieve an absolute majority alone or form a coalition with any other force, a possibility that would remain valid for the partnership between the PNV and the socialists.
Another
curiosity
of these Basque elections lies in the
generational change in the nationalist parties
. The historic lehendakari of the PNV Iñigo Urkullu, who has governed the Basque Country since 2012, does not aspire to a fourth term. They say in Euskadi, in low voices, that he would have wanted to run but that the party decided to bet on a new face that would bring a breath of renewal to so many years of wear and tear in the government.
That is why the PNV candidate is Imanol Pradales, a 48-year-old doctor in Political Science who passed through the Provincial Council of Vizcaya - one of the three provinces that make up the Basque Country - and who, in the last days of the campaign, suffered an attack. with pepper spray that left him blind for a few hours after an event.
The young vote
“The PNV is worn out. In the last municipal and general elections it was noted that the hegemonic party that won all the elections does not have it so easy. There is an important factor that is that many young people are voting for the first time,” Landaburu emphasizes.
Since the last regional elections in 2020, the Basque electoral roll added some 75 thousand children who can vote this Sunday. And
most of them would lean towards Bildu's more radical nationalism.
EH Bildu also opted for a younger candidate with less weight on his shoulders than Arnaldo Otegi, general coordinator of the party, who served several sentences and a disqualification until 2021 for having been a member of the former ETA.
For these elections, EH Bildu is betting on Pello Otxandiano, a 40-year-old doctor in Telecommunications Engineering who has never held public office although he was in the behind-the-scenes design of Sortu, the name that Herri Batasuna's nationalist left adopted when it managed to be legalized as political force and which today is part of Bildu.
Otxandiano kept a low profile in the first part of the electoral campaign, somewhat overshadowed by the euphoria of the celebrations for the victory of Athletic Bilbao who, after 40 years, once again lifted the Copa del Rey.
The ghost of ETA
Otxandiano, however, had his tense moment when in an interview he was asked if he considered that ETA had been a terrorist group and the Bildu candidate avoided admitting it.
“ETA was an armed group that may have various considerations,” said Otxandiano. Fortunately, ETA no longer exists and we can face the future in a more shared way, as well as memory. One can argue about the considerations of what terrorism is and what it is not. The main issue is to diagnose how political conflicts are overcome and we have made a lot of progress. Basque society is in another phase and has overcome this debate," he said.
His refusal to accept ETA's terrorism heated up the campaign.
“ETA was a mistake, a horror and a drama for Euskadi, and it was terrorism,” Pradales, his PNV rival, reproached him.
The president of the government,
Pedro Sánchez, entered the debate:
“I believe that things must be called by their name and ETA was not an armed band,” he said.
“It was a terrorist band that was defeated by Spanish democracy. ETA has not existed for more than ten years and was fortunately defeated by democracy thanks to the unity of all political forces, of the whole of Basque society and of the whole of Spanish society,” Sánchez added.
Days later, the Bildu candidate apologized: "If with those words I could hurt the sensitivity of the victims of ETA, I apologize."
“They reject ETA but they do not condemn it”
“The issue of ETA has resurfaced because the former political arm of the armed organization that today is a democratic party has not yet firmly condemned it,” says Landaburu.
“They reject it, but the request is that they condemn it. There is the ambiguity of this nationalist left that has not done its homework with its past nor has it unloaded the backpacks it has about its past,” he insists.
“I speak with many people on the nationalist left, with former members of the ETA organization who can recognize it privately, that there was indeed a very disastrous time for the Basque Country with terrorism,” he adds. They say it in private, but they still can't say it in public. Because it would be giving up your past. And without forgetting that they still have 150 prisoners in prison, former members of ETA, who are serving their sentences."
Fernando Savater's position
The non-recognition of ETA terrorism caused a group of Basque intellectuals, including the philosopher and writer Fernando Savater, to raise their voices to condemn the attitude of the Bildu candidate.
“The last negotiation process with ETA involved the legalization of its political arm so that it could lay down its weapons and engage in politics in the institutions. The fact that they are now legal again does not make them democrats. If the leaders of the self-proclaimed 'abertzale left' ended up accepting the police defeat, it was for strategic reasons, and not ethical ones," the manifesto states.
“We demand that political parties and representatives not make agreements or govern with the heirs of the terrorist group. We understand that there is nothing more reactionary and undemocratic than killing to put a border where there is none," requests the text that is also signed by the filmmaker and playwright Jon Viar, the writer Angel García Ronda, the pianist Ana García Urcola and the sculptor Lucía Vallejo, among other intellectuals and artists.
Independence, in the background
“Independence is on hold. The priorities are not the independence or the sovereignty of the Basque Country,” says Landaburu and cites a recent survey according to which Basque society's support for independence fell in the last two years from 30 to 20 percent.
With the Catalan experience so close, the Basque Country does not want to follow in the footsteps of Catalonia, despite the fact that the current Catalan president and Esquerra candidate for the Catalan elections on May 12, Pere Aragonès, participated in the closing of the Bildu campaign together to your candidate.
“We have had enough with terrorism to now raise issues of secession. Basque society is plural but it is not willing to engage in political adventures,” says Landaburu.