Navarre’s socialists, led by the president of the community, María Chivite, and Geroa Bai closed last night an agreement to form a government with deputies from Contigo-Zurekin, the brand with which Podemos, IU and other formations presented themselves in the elections of May 28.
Uxue Barkos will keep the second vice-presidency that he already led in the previous legislature and will also control four ministries, including that of Health. Instead, Geroa cedes to Contigo-Zurekin the area of ??Housing that had been under its control in the previous mandate. Barkos’ party will also be responsible for the areas of Agriculture, Livestock and Environment and an economic vice-presidency. The Health area and this vice-presidency constitute the main trophy of these negotiations for nationalist training.
If an agreement is not reached, elections would have been called again in three weeks, something that a priori none of the forces that were sitting at the table of the Navarrese Parliament where the meeting was held until after 10 p.m. wanted .
Geroa Bai – a formation in which the Navarrese PNB is integrated – called this meeting yesterday afternoon with its eventual partners. His delegation was headed by Uxue Barkos, the leader of the party. Chivite, on the other hand, delegated to the secretary of organization and parliamentary spokesman Ramón Alzórriz.
The meeting started at 5pm and lasted well into the night with a stoppage of more than an hour. Geroa Bia brought to the table a counter-offer to the one the Navarrese socialists had made a few days ago with new conditions on monitoring compliance with the government pact and a new distribution of responsibilities within the executive that the nationalist formation considered insufficient.
Geroa Bai did not get good results in this past election when he lost two seats while the Navarre Socialists kept their eleven. In the previous legislature they governed together. The sum of the Navarrese socialists, Geroa Bai and Contigo-Zurekin, reaches 21 deputies, one more than the number of the 15 deputies of the force with the most votes on May 28, Unió del Poble Navarrès – which went from 19 to 15 seats –, to which must be added the 3 obtained by the Popular Party and the 2 by Vox.
21 against 20. However, the absolute majority in the Navarrese Parliament is 26 deputies, so the collaboration of EH Bildu is necessary, which should abstain or vote in favor. This formation was already offered a week ago to favor the agreement between the nationalists and progressives and has gone so far as to raise a consultation with the grassroots to vote affirmatively. In any case, EH Bildu would not be part of the regional government.
Geroa Bai became the second force in Navarre and its leader, Uxue Barkos, won the presidency of the community in 2015 with an alternative and transversal discourse that occupied the centrality of the polarized Navarra politics. Since 2019, however, the coalition has lost strength in the face of the push of EH Bildu – which in the elections of May 28 obtained one more deputy than in the previous legislature – and of a PSOE that is always gaining weight that moves away from the UPN. The Basque formation has weighed Chivite’s offer with an eye on its future as a political project in four years.
