Sunday, April 21, 2024

Left-wing separatist Bildu eyes historic win in Basque vote

Alfons LUNA
Sun, 21 April 2024 

Some 1.8 million voters are casting their ballots to choose 75 lawmakers for the Basque parliament (ANDER GILLENEA)


Spain's northern Basque Country votes Sunday in a regional election that polls suggest will be won by the left-wing separatist Bildu, seen as the heir of the political wing of the defunct armed separatist group ETA.

The outcome could leave Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's ruling Socialist Worker's party in the difficult position of having to decide between two key parliamentary allies.

Polls predict a victory for EH Bildu, a coalition which has worked to disassociate itself from ETA whose bloody struggle for an independent Basque homeland claimed 850 lives before it rejected violence in 2011.


More than 700 polling stations opened at 9:00 am (0700 GMT) with some 1.8 million voters eligible to cast their ballots for 75 lawmakers in the Basque regional parliament.

By 1:00 pm, participation stood at 28 percent, officials said. Voting closes at 8:00 pm.

With a large following among young people thanks to its strong stance on social issues, Bildu has climbed steadily in the polls and now looks set to win the most votes.

"We are facing an opportunity for a change that leaves behind outdated policies and ways of doing politics, and reverses the sense of inertia," Bildu's candidate for regional leader, Pello Otxandiano, told reporters after voting in his hometown of Otxandio.

"We're making a massive appeal for people to get out and vote for change today."

If polls are correct, Bildu looks set for a historic win, inching ahead of separatist Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), a centrist faction that has ruled the region for decades.

"Before, the only party looking after Basque interests was the PNV, so everyone voted for them regardless of their political leanings," 40-year-old social worker Elena Garcia, 40, told AFP in Bilbao, saying the ETA era was now well in the past.

"But now if you are left-wing and more socially minded, you will vote for Bildu," Garcia added.

- Socialists as kingmaker -

Surveys indicate it will be a tight race with neither party set to win an absolute majority, leaving the regional branch of the Socialist party as kingmaker.

Sanchez's Socialist-led government relies on key support from a network of regional allies, including both the PNV and Bildu, to govern, meaning the decision could cost him.

But Eurasia Group analyst Federico Santi said it was "unlikely that the result of the election would threaten the stability of (Sanchez's) government".

Until now, the PNV has governed the Basque Country in coalition with the Socialists, who have already ruled out supporting Bildu, whose leader, Arnaldo Otegi, was convicted of ETA membership but later credited with helping steer the group away from violence.

"Condemning terrorism is (Bildu's) outstanding debt to Basque society and as long as they do not do that... we will not make any type of deal with them," the Socialist candidate Eneko Andueza told public radio.

Throughout the campaign, the issue hardly came up until earlier this week, when Otxandiano caused anger when he failed to call ETA a "terrorist organisation", referring to it only as an "armed group".

"Even if Bildu wins, it will not be able to govern because no party will be willing to make an alliance with it," said Pablo Simon, a political scientist from Madrid's Carlos III University.

- A wealthy region -

With 2.2 million residents, the Basque Country has the second highest regional income per capita in Spain, after Madrid, which averages around 36,000 euros ($38,400).

Its economy accounts for 5.9 percent of Spain's gross domestic product, ranking fifth of Spain's 17 regions, CaixaBank research figures indicate.

It is also the region with the lowest unemployment figure in Spain at 7.9 percent, according to Basque government figures.

The father of Basque nationalism was Sabino Arana, who set up the PNV in 1895. His ultra-Catholic, anti-Spanish ideology grew out of his vehement opposition to the thousands of Spaniards flocking to the area as a result of the industrial revolution.

ETA emerged in 1959 out of a split within the PNV's youth movement who were angered by what they saw as the party's inability to stand up to Francisco Franco's dictatorship.

In its first recorded act of bloodshed, ETA militants shot dead a policeman on June 7, 1968 in the city of Villabona, according to Spanish interior ministry documents.


Spain Tried to Outlaw Its Separatists: Now They Call the Shots

Rodrigo Orihuela
Fri, 19 April 2024 





(Bloomberg) -- After the Spanish state released the activists who’d been jailed for their connections to the Basque terrorist group ETA, most faded into the background. But not Arnaldo Otegi.

When he was let out in 2016 Otegi returned to take up a similar role in Basque politics to the one that led to his arrest. The country around him had changed over his six-year incarceration, even if he had not: his party had reinvented itself as a legitimate political player — the courts would anyway rule his conviction to be unjust — and the militant separatist movement out of which it grew had laid down arms.

Now, a mere 13 years after that cease fire that put an end to a generation of violence, he’s on the verge of staging a major political upset as the Basques head to elections with the Bildu party he leads ahead in the polls. If Bildu unseat the four-decade incumbents in Sunday’s election it marks a threshold moment for Otegi as well as for the leftist flank of the Basque nationalist movement. Victory would also mean Spain has to contend with a new sign of how the country is fragmenting.

“We are in no hurry,” said Otegi in an interview at his party’s Bilbao base. Whatever the outcome of the elections, he added, “We’re in the process of consolidating ourselves as a real alternative for the future.”

Something else had changed in Otegi’s absence. The two-party system that since Franco’s death had reliably transfered power between left and right broke down, granting new prominence to an array of small interests and propelling the concerns of separatists onto both the national stage and the legislature.

The ascendancy of Bildu offers fresh proof that this web of competing alliances is the tangle through which Spain’s main parties must now pick their way.

It arrives just as the country prepares for the controversial return of exiled Catalan separatist Carles Puigdemont. Puigdemont, who fled the Spanish courts after organizing an illegal referendum on independence in 2017, secured an amnesty from Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in exchange for the handful of votes the Socialist needed to secure a new term after last year’s election.

Read More: Catalan Pariah Returns to Spain With Plans to Retake Power

As these smaller groups have lent the governing parties votes, they’ve also called the shots. And none so successfully as the PNV, the pro-business incumbents who Bildu threatens to unseat.

While Bildu offers itself as a departure from what Otegi called the PNV’s “analog” way of doing politics, the upstart Bildu has sapped the PNV’s support in part by aping its tactics, according to the sociologist and psephologist Braulio Gomez who works at Bilbao’s University of Deusto.

After electing deputies to the national legislature in Madrid since 2015, part of Bildu’s journey to respectability has depended on how it’s cooperated with Sanchez’s government. “The party moved out of its corner,” Gomez said of Bildu. And though the PNV responded by complaining “Bildu is copying us,” he added — that strategy has hardly hurt its standing with voters.

There is a tower prominent on the skyline seen from the window of Bildu’s offices a short way up the river from Bilbao’s Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum. It houses Iberdrola SA, Europe’s most valuable producer of renewables. And although it operates in more than 20 countries and most of its business is run out of the national capital it has chosen to stay headquartered in the region, where it is the biggest tax payer, meaning the PNV’s been quick to champion its interests in Madrid.

That was evidenced in mid-2021, when Sanchez’s government was forced to backtrack on a proposal to tax energy companies because the PNV on whose votes it would depend signaled opposition to the move.

Bildu is focused on building its base and demonstrating that it can be a mainstream political party, according to Pello Otxandiano, the 41-year old candidate who’s standing to lead the regional legislature. “Whether we win or not, we’re drawing a new political map,” he said in an interview at the party base.

Few signs of Bildu’s controversial origins are visible beyond those offices’ heavily fortified front door. Inside, a team of enthusiastic young party functionaries leave the atmosphere more reminiscent of a WeWork than the militant cell some in Madrid like to imagine.

Bildu’s elevation owes in large part to Sanchez, who gave it a veneer of respectability by courting its votes.

Now, his creation may come to backfire. By teaming up with Bildu, the premier also contributed to the weakening of his longer-standing ally the PNV. If, as expected, Sunday’s result gives Bildu a chance to govern the Basque country the PNV will reconsider how to manage its relationship with Sanchez and could have incentives to cut him loose at some stage, according to a high-ranking PNV official who asked to speak anonymously.

The relationship between Sanchez and the Basque and Catalan nationalists on whom he’s relied to consolidate power in Madrid is foremost a marriage of convenience. All four principle nationalist parties are pragmatic about the relationship, according to top officials in Bildu, the PNV and the two Catalan parties.

They’ll exact concessions for as long as Sanchez needs them without seeking to establish a long-term strategy for cooperation, people familiar with all four parties’ electoral strategies said, while asking to remain anonymous.

What makes this competitive web of interests even less predictable is that Bildu’s path to regional government is not guaranteed, even if they place first on Sunday. Sanchez’s Socialists are expected to come in third and have the luxury of deciding whether to help Bildu govern or continue in their existing coalition with the PNV. Either decision will have ramifications on the national stage, as both Basque groups are key allies of Sanchez in Madrid.

A few months ago, his Socialists stunned observers of Spanish politics when they backed a no-confidence motion Bildu brought against the right-leaning government in the city of Pamplona. But it is improbable that situation will repeat itself in the Basque country, according to a top Socialist official.

The Socialists are likely to remain faithful to the PNV after Sunday’s elections, the person said — despite their ideological compatibility with Bildu. That’s down to the perception of the leftist party outside its home region. Many voters don’t think it’s gone far enough in rejecting the violence of the terrorist attacks perpetrated by ETA, the person said, adding that the calculation was made on the basis that not backing Bildu wouldn’t put the stability of Sanchez’s weak government at risk.

For Bildu, choosing a candidate in Otxandiano with no links to the bloody years is part of its own process of breaking with the past.

But the PNV is also feeling pressure to change. Recently, rather than seek a fourth term for the sitting regional president, they abruptly replaced their candidate in an effort to court a younger vote and impede the rise of Bildu. The 11-year leader of the PNV Andoni Ortuzar, speaking at his own headquarters, acknowledged the party was sensing voter fatigue.

“Change is good” he said of the switch-up. On Sunday, Spain will learn how far that sentiment goes.

--With assistance from Ana Andrade (Economist), Jorge Valero and Thomas Hall.

 Bloomberg Businessweek

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