What may have been the shortest campaign in history ended yesterday in the Basque Country practically as it began, with the question of whether, twelve and a half years after ETA announced the definitive cessation of its armed activity and six after communicating its dissolution, Bildu achieves the milestone of unseating the PNV as the leading political force, even without having condemned the organization's crimes. The Basque nationalists and the PSE, committed to renewing the government coalition they have held since 2016, are confident that the final acceleration of the race – marked by the refusal of the nationalist left candidate to classify the band as terrorist and by the attack with pepper spray on the Peneuvista candidate, Imanol Pradales – has allowed them to recover ground. But the nationalist left continues to trust in its victory.
The Basque political system has a particularity compared to the national one and that of the majority of autonomous communities and that is that in the investiture of the future lehendakari it is not possible to vote against. Groups can only say yes or abstain to candidates who present themselves. And, in practice, that means right now that Pradales has, no matter what happens, all the ballots to succeed Iñigo Urkullu because neither his party nor Bildu will reach the absolute majority on their own, because the socialists have already guaranteed him support and because Otegi's party has no one else to join with except Podemos, to whom the polls give, in the best of cases, two seats.
What may seem like a reassuring element for what has been the ruling party in the Basque Country for 40 years, almost without interruption, has ended up being, however, in the opinion of some of its members, a double-edged sword that has made the to a part of his former electorate at a time when the acronyms show noticeable wear. But in the two-headed formation, chaired by Andoni Ortuzar, they believe that in the last five days, after a hypotensive pre-campaign and start of the campaign, the board has suffered a shake-up.
Both in the PNV and in the PSE understood that Bildu had reached the point of putting up posters with all its voters mobilized and that they still had to wake up their own. Something that has not been easy. Holy Week first, the previews of Athletic-Mallorca and the subsequent victory of the Bilbao club, winner of the Copa del Rey in Seville, added to the subsequent mourning for the death of former president José Antonio Ardanza, made the task difficult. They point out, however, that things changed last Monday. “It was when we went from the barge to the campaign,” they say in the nationalist party.
There are disagreements about which was the largest trigger. Some believe that seeing black on white on Monday, the last day allowed by law, when there was unanimity in the polls regarding Bildu's victory, activated antibodies. Others attach greater importance to the interview in which Pello Otxandiano demonstrated in Ser that, despite belonging to a new generation, focusing his speech on the social and having a different aesthetic, his position regarding ETA terrorism is exactly that of his ' greater'. And in the PNV they put another factor into the equation: Pradales's intervention in the EiTB debate shortly after the attack that left him blind for several minutes. «In the face of a stress reaction he reacted with lehendakari wood,» they say.
That Otxandiano himself believes that he made a mistake with a response that allowed him to include in the campaign an issue that even the PP had relegated and to which only the PSE was resorting to convince its voters that, despite Sánchez's links with the left abertzale, he will not agree with Bildu out of ethical conviction, it is evident. The nationalist candidate regretted on Thursday on Telebilbao for having expressed himself in those terms. Not because of the substance, he reflected what he thinks. “I regret not having responded by saying that we have to take this issue out of the electoral context,” he argued.
Uncertain effect
How much this episode – amplified at the national level by the sudden indignation staged by the Government of Pedro Sánchez – could have altered the course of the campaign, until then focused on health or housing, is not clear. Some socialists believe that enough, despite recognizing that Otxandiano only made evident what was already known. “There are transfers to Bildu from Podemos and Sumar that could have been stopped,” says a leader of the group. The PNV believes that it could have served to capture useful votes, both from abstention, as well as from the PSE or the PP. Bildu sources assure, however, that they do not see any impact and predict a victory by one or two seats.
Otegi's party has assumed that this eventual result will not help it govern now, but its is a long-term strategy in which, for the moment, it is content with broadening its bases. The preventive slamming of the door by the socialists, who aspire to retain their 10 deputies or grow to 11, does not suggest any type of retaliation against Sánchez, who depends on his support to govern. Arnaldo Otegi has made it clear on many occasions that he sees the weakness of the head of the Executive as an opportunity to produce progress in “the debate on stateless nations, such as the Basque Country”, an issue in which Bildu is arm in arm with ERC. It is not trivial that Otxandiano was accompanied yesterday at the closing of the campaign by the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonés, and the Northern Irish minister Conor Murphy, a former member of the IRA. For the PNV and the PSE, in any case, being able to reissue the Government coalition would not be enough. Their objective, up in the air according to the polls, is to add between them an absolute majority of 38 seats, which is not necessary for the investiture but would facilitate governability. The socialists are confident for now of holding their position. They believe that in a complicated situation, Eneko Andueza – party leader since the end of 2021 – has been able to defend his space between the nationalists and Bildu, with whom there are porous borders. “Our voters always mobilize later, but we have gotten better,” they say.
If the sum did not work for them, the rest of the actors could gain a role that they do not have today. The PP, which in 2020 did not exceed six deputies and now aspires to grow to two, in the best scenario, has already warned that it will not give anything away after the experience of the municipal and provincial elections of May last year, when with its votes prevented Bildu from taking over the Vitoria City Council and the Guipúzcoa Provincial Council (and in Catalonia, from preventing the city of Barcelona from falling into the hands of the independentists, with whom Sánchez later agreed on his investiture and to whom the mayor, Jaume Collboni , now plans to incorporate the Government).
Sumar has tried in recent days to present himself as the only guarantee that the PNV and the PSE carry out “left-wing policies.” But, as in the case of Podemos, it is not clear that it will achieve representation.
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