ANALYSIS:BASQUE NATIONALIST parties lost their majority in the Basque parliament for the first time in Sunday's elections, but only by a single seat. In theory, this means that the next Basque government could be formed by parties lukewarm, or even hostile, to the distinctive Basque identity forged by the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) over the last 30 years.
This would represent not just a new set of policies but a seismic political shift. But while such a change is mathematically possible, it remains hard to see how it can be implemented.
For one thing, the election result does not actually signal any radical change in the deeply divided Basque community. This is because this poll saw another “first” for the three Basque provinces involved. Radical Basque nationalist parties alleged to support the terrorist group Eta were excluded by the courts.
Nevertheless one such group, D3M, printed a mass of illegal ballot papers, and so garnered about 100,000 spoiled votes. If those votes were included, the radical newspaper Gara argued yesterday, Basque nationalist parties would still hold a five-seat majority in the 75-seat parliament. What’s more, the PNV did very well in these elections, remaining the biggest force in the parliament with 30 seats, but without enough obvious allies in smaller nationalist parties to form a government.
None of this will, in itself, stop the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), currently in power in Madrid, from forming a new Basque government with the conservative Partido Popular (PP). On the contrary, both these parties drafted the controversial law under which groups which refuse to condemn terrorist acts are barred from democratic participation. They had a grim and powerful motivation for doing so: their own elected representatives were (and are) repeatedly targeted by Eta.
In a familiar turn on the vicious circle of the Basque conflict, however, the banning has given fresh ammunition to Eta propagandists. Logically, however, the PSOE (24 seats) and the PP (13) should be happy to grasp the unique opportunity their election results offer to oust the Basque Nationalist Party.
And yesterday, the PP indicated that it would vote for the Basque Socialist leader, Patxi López, against the outgoing first minister, the PNV’s Juan José Ibarretxe. So did the single deputy from a new party, the Union for Progress and Democracy (UPyD), who holds the balance of power.
For López and his party, however, both offers come with big downsides. The antagonism between the PSOE and PP in the Madrid parliament is a little less incandescent than it used to be, but it is still hard to imagine them working together effectively.
Moreover López is close to the strong vasquista (basquist) wing in the PSOE, which is sensitive to the Basque culture and embraces the Basque language, Euskera. The PP, on the other hand, is unabashed in its espousal of Spanish nationalism. As for UPyD, it has come close to equating the current teaching of Basque culture with terrorism.
López would not only feel uncomfortable implementing such policies, he knows they would galvanise both the democratically impeccable Basque nationalists of the PNV and the radical nationalists close to Eta into a permanently militant opposition which could make the Basque Country ungovernable.
He also knows he will get no thanks from Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero if he alienates the PNV too deeply because Zapatero often needs PNV support to rule in Madrid. He could try leading a minority government but such an arrangement would be chronically unstable.
And so, ironically, he may end up participating in a government led by the PNV.
The more Basque politics changes, it seems, the more it remains the same.
Paddy Woodworth is the author of The Basque Country (OUP, 2008)