Euskadi: Interesting times
01 March 2005
The Basque regional elections were held on 17 April 2005 and threw up some interesting results, as the outgoing government coalition formed by PNV/EA (Basque Nationalist Party/
Eusko Alkartasuna), and EB (United Left) failed to secure a majority. Nonetheless, PNV/EA remained the party that won the highest percentage of the vote (38.6%) and the most seats (29, down from 33), and the PSE (the Basque branch of the Socialist party, up from 13 to 18 seats) overtook the PPE (its Popular party counterpart, down from 19 to 15) as the second largest party. This has produced deadlock, as the sum of PSOE and PPE seats in the Basque parliament is 33, one more than that of the outgoing PNV/EA and EB government, which obtained 32 seats. A smaller left-nationalist party,
Aralar, appears to be supporting the outgoing coalition (it voted for the PNV candidate in the Basque parliament's presidential election) although it has not yet committed itself. 38 seats are needed to secure a majority in the Basque parliament. Thus, the result has been interpreted by the PPE and PSOE as a defeat for the Ibarretxe plan (see Statewatch Vol 15 no 1), as the
lehendakari (head of the Basque government) had called the elections shortly after his plan was debated and rejected in the Spanish Congress after it had been approved by a slender majority in the Basque parliament in Vitoria. However, there is a piece missing from the equation: EHAK (the Communist Party of the Basque Lands) obtained its best-ever election result (over 150,000 votes, equivalent to 12.5% and nine seats) after calling on voters of the banned
Batasuna party to vote for them "in defence of civil liberties", as did leaders of the party that was proscribed after it was deemed part of ETA.
Overall, the election results threw up a largely unchanged landscape, with Basque society divided into two large blocs, one nationalist (PNV/EA, Aralar, EHAK), which obtained slightly over half of the votes, and another non-nationalist (PSE, PPE, EB). Nonetheless, the PNV's role as the party of government in Euskadi (which is still the likeliest outcome of talks) appears to have been weakened by the last-minute possibility that EHAK offered former
Batasuna voters to participate in the election.
A month on from the election, the composition of the future government is still unclear. Ibarretxe has conducted a round of conversations with other parliamentary groups to form a new government, while the leader of the Socialist party in Euskadi, Patxi López, has started his own series of consultations after staking a claim to become
lehendakari. Nonetheless, the fact that any agreement with EHAK would inevitably lead to accusations of collusion between mainstream nationalist parties and ETA, and that the PPE is increasingly isolated as a result of its belligerent stance (EB and Aralar have indicated that they would not participate in any alliance supported by the votes of the PPE) mean that it will be difficult to break the deadlock. This became evident in the attempt to elect a president of the Basque parliament in mid-May, at which the Socialist and PNV candidates both repeatedly received the same number of votes (33), with the EHAK representatives abstaining. The only viable governments would involve a pact between the outgoing coalition and EHAK, a minority government by the PNV/EA and EB, or an unprecedented alliance between the outgoing coalition and the Socialists.
The political conflict has been further fuelled by the PPE's accusation that the failure by the Socialist national government to proscribe EHAK (as happened to another left-nationalist electoral list,
Auzkera Gustiak) represents a betrayal of the Anti-terrorist Pact between the two parties, and has allowed ETA to regain a presence within the institutions.
The Anti-terrorist Pact between the PSOE and PP was signed on 8 December 2000, with the goal of ensuring a consensus between the t