Basque Elections or The Long Shadow of Political Violence

Following a hotly contested regional election in the Basque Country, the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) narrowly avoided possible replacement as the most voted-for party by the political arm of the disbanded terrorist group ETA: EH Bildu. The two were almost tied, although the PNV eventually beat Bildu by 30,000 votes. However, a coalition government will now be required.

The rise of the hard-left among Basques has long been predicted and will continue to be one of several swords of Damocles hanging over Spanish politics. 

The PNV is a center-right, middle-class party anchored in a particularly bizarre version of 19th-century nationalism embraced by its founder, Sabino Arana, who suggested that Basque was the language spoken in Atlantis, as well as by the Biblical Noah. 

Of course, the PNV has changed a lot since then, and has often been viewed as a relatively benign, accommodating, sociologically bourgeois, presence by the country’s major parties. However, it would be remiss not to mention its part in fomenting the climate of violence that once characterized the Basque Country. Ex-ETA member and bestselling author Jon Juaristi recalls in his memoirs that it was often members of the PNV who taught youngsters to set up car bombs during ETA’s reign of terror. The idea that there was some impermeable barrier between ETA’s violent Marxist or anarchist base and the PNV’s center-right liberals and Catholics is an opiate, a soothing myth promulgated in Spain to make people feel better about the political alliances of the country’s main parties.

Bildu, for its part, is a left-wing party whose leader, Arnaldo Otegui, describes himself as a Marxist. It began life as the political arm of ETA, with its figureheads refusing to describe ETA as a terrorist organization to this day, although the party officially rejects the use of violence.

One of VOX’s youngest deputies, Rocío De Meer, is no stranger to being the target of political violence. She recently described the tense conditions and outright attacks under which her party has campaigned in Spain’s northeastern region, and the general climate of intimidation:

This is the violence that no one is condemning … There are people who watch [our electoral events] from balconies, and then there are those who listen from behind closed shutters [in homes and apartments] … What is intolerable is that we have normalized this situation in three of Spain’s provinces [that make up the Basque Country]: Spanish people have to live in fear of their political opinions being known in these three provinces.

In this context, she brings up an essential point that draws into question the validity of any democratic election in the Basque Country, a treasonous reality that Spain’s cowardly political class and, frankly, the country’s deep-seated social conformity, has accepted and whose bitter fruit it now must reap:

The [electoral] majority [in the Basque country] is the result of the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Basques from their homes [during ETA’s decades-long campaign of violence] … a totalitarian minority imposed itself at the time, and now we are where we are.

“We are where we are.”

And where we are is that the children and grandchildren of Basques who left their homes under the threat of death to live elsewhere in Spain now cannot vote in Basque elections. Over the course of a few decades, and in plain sight, we accepted the ideological cleansing of a whole region by a terrorist organization and its institutional allies, reshaping society and permanently impacting its electoral map.

For my part, I think VOX has not done enough to harass the media narrative and Basque society out of its comfortable stance. Anything short of disruptive spectacle will not do if patriots hope to make a dent in the social engineering to which the Basque Country has been subject. There should be photographs of the ETA’s infant victims plastered on municipal buildings where Bildu governs, and quotes by the father of Basque nationalism, Arana, from the end of his life, when he renounced the project for Basque independence, draped in bold lettering on major plazas. The region’s guilty conscience and false political consciousness need to be attacked head-on.

For their part, there is some irony in the fact that Bildu is now a typical, pro-migration, ‘woke’ Left party, happy to fill the Basque Country with migrants so long as they learn Basque and support independence from Spain.

The trajectory of Basque nationalism, from a defense of ethnic particularism, Carlism, and an emphasis on Basque fueros (local laws) within a quasi-medieval conception of Spanish patriotism, to one of Europe’s most fantasist versions of 19th-century nationalism, has led to the expulsion of large swaths of Basques on account of their identifying with Spain, whose replacement, it now seems, will be a large migrant population which Bildu hopes to integrate. 

Non-separatist Basques and non-Basque Spaniards are reaping what they sowed through indifference, and Basque separatists are reaping what they sowed through violence.