This text belongs to ‘Penínsulas’, the newsletter that Enric Juliana sends to the readers of ‘La Vanguardia’ every Tuesday. If you want to receive it in your mailbox, sign up here.
“No one will talk about ETA next time,” wrote Lola García, deputy director of La Vanguardia, on Sunday night, as a first assessment of the electoral results in the Basque Country. I recommend that you read that article. Lola García knows about politics and writes with great agility. She caught the vibe well. There were people in Madrid DF, the Madrid of the power circuits and the big media speakers, who were waiting for a clear victory for EH Bildu in last Sunday’s elections. Don’t be surprised. Don’t be surprised because in the coming days you will see those same actors wishing for Junts’ victory in the Catalan elections. Some of those who a few months ago shouted at the top of their lungs “Puigdemont to prison!” will soon send us cabalistic signals in favor of a victory for El Fugitivo in order to put an end to El Usurpador as soon as possible. There is an old maxim that says: “The enemy of my enemy can be my friend.” Spanish politics should never be taken literally, despite the emphatic nature of its cries and statements. That is one of the things I have learned after twenty years in Madrid.
May Bildu win. That was the vibe. Surely you also caught it on some radio and television programs if you continue to have the holy patience to follow the political gatherings. The same people who talk about ETA as if the terrorist organization still existed could not hide the shine in their eyes at a possible victory for Bildu. Gathering meat.
These first notes serve to verify the importance of the electoral results of this past Sunday in the Basque Country. Political events should not only be judged by what they directly contribute, but also by what they prevent from happening. Sunday’s results in Euskadi are going to have a certain stabilizing effect, pending the Catalan elections, whose outcome could be much more complex. A kind reader, Sergio Lorenzi, defined the current Spanish political situation in the following way: a risky juggling game in which all the Chinese plates spin at the same time. I asked Lorenzi for permission to quote that metaphor and he very kindly granted it to me. The disaster of the oriental dishes could have started this past Sunday in the Basque Country and it has not happened. Now comes Catalonia and I warn you that on the Catalan track some plate always tends to break, sometimes the entire set of dishes.
Pedro Sánchez retains the key to governability in the Basque Country and fate has led to a tie between PNV and EH Bildu that can keep both parties in a stable orbit in the Congress of Deputies. “We could not have obtained a better result, it seems expressly designed,” a senior member of the PSOE said ironically yesterday in Barcelona. The Socialist Party is consolidating itself as an essential hinge in Basque politics, while the two nationalist parties are so tied that they cannot go on an adventure. The PNV cannot now consider future excursions with the Popular Party. That is a fact of special interest for Carles Puigdemont and for the Catalan employers’ association Foment del Treball, the business organization that is carrying out the most sophisticated political action at the moment in Spain, very much in the Italian way, very much in the Christian Democrat way. Those from Sabin Etxea cannot open the door too much for Alberto Núñez Feijóo. And at Bildu they cannot get out of the lane of pactism that is giving them such good results.
The PNV is dedicated to internal renewal. There will surely be a replacement in the presidency of the party after the European elections. Pay attention to the figure of Itxaso Atutxa, current president of the Bizkai Buru Batzar, the executive committee in Vizcaya, as a possible replacement for Andoni Ortuzar. The PNV continues to have a lot of electoral strength in the province of Vizcaya, where it has obtained 39.5% of the votes, and will have to review its weaknesses in Guipúzcoa (31.7%) and Álava (27%). As Jordi Juan, director of La Vanguardia, wrote yesterday, Sunday’s elections were still the PNV elections.
You have to be careful with extrapolations. These are regional elections, not partial general elections. The vote has been taken with the governorship of the Basque Country in mind, a society made up of just over two million people, with the second highest standard of living in Spain after the Community of Madrid. There is a Basque political culture, there is a Basque tax jurisdiction, there is a specific electoral system (25 deputies per province, all three equally), and there is a sphere of Basque information and opinion that is not easy to penetrate from the outside. There is a Basque national reality. We will see that reality again in Catalonia in the coming weeks, in this case without a specific electoral system.
Spain is currently divided between those who accept this polycentric reality and those who dream of destroying it to make the country more uniform. He would say that this second detachment is the main loser of Sunday’s elections. Just yesterday, voices from the Madrid right began to criticize the Basque PP for being “lazy”, reproaching it for having said too little about ETA during the campaign. It was an unequivocal criticism of Núñez Feijóo. He already sent warning signals when, very surprisingly, he offered a pardon with conditions to Puigdemont in the middle of the Galician election campaign. “This PP doesn’t even have half a slap in the face,” he wrote to himself those days. However, the excellent result of the Galician PP on February 18 ended up reaffirming the current head of the opposition. The Basque result does not discredit him, but it does not help him. He does not help him, because the PNV cannot now plan future excursions with Feijóo.
We must be careful with extrapolations, but Sunday’s results also tell us that we are not facing a structural and irrevocable collapse of the socialist vote as a consequence of the amnesty law and everything that has come after, especially the Koldo case, which yesterday had a special role in Congress. A situation of structural collapse of the PSOE would have appeared on the Basque scoreboard. The PSE-PSOE has gained votes and two seats compared to 2020, establishing itself as the essential ally to govern.
The PSOE is not bankrupt, but it suffers from strong weakness in some communities. In Madrid, for example. The bankruptcy occurs in the political-electoral space that Sumar and Podemos are currently competing for. Unidas Podemos, already in a phase of decline, obtained six seats in the Basque elections four years ago. Sumar has now obtained a deputy and Podemos has gone to zero. Let us remember that in the 2016 general elections, Unidas Podemos was the most voted party in the Basque Country, reaching close to 30% of the votes. The decline graph is very strong. They have broken. The split of Sumar and Podemos is reaping catastrophic results that are very difficult to solve. Thinking about reunification is almost impossible today. If general elections were held now, the left would surely lose as a result of this split. Yolanda Díaz’s responsibility in the coming months is important. Excessive fantasies and errors in reading political time often take their toll. A political current that proposes herculean changes to society cannot happily display internal disloyalties. Between the magnitude of the purpose and the solidity of the fiber there must be a good dialectical relationship.
Next time we will not talk about ETA, wrote Lola García. Next time there won’t even be talk of amnesty, she would add. Notice how the amnesty is losing prominence in the furious Spanish political debate. The background coordinates are changing and it is difficult to see it on a day-to-day basis. Next time, in four years, we will talk about very different things, because who knows what will have happened to Europe in that time. That is today the gravitational force that moves us: the uncertainty about Europe, the uncertain continuity of everything that the European project has represented in recent decades. There is the dark matter of our days.
