The agreement between PSOE and EH Bildu on the motion of no confidence in Pamplona has resulted in a monumental political battle in which the right has not spared insults and even insults. “You are scum,” UPN leader Javier Esparza told the socialists. The regionalist leader also lashed out at the PNB, which will support the change in the Navarra capital through Geroa Bai, while from the popular ranks they warn the Jeltzales that “they will be next”, alluding to a hypothetical turn of the policy of socialist pacts. However, the reality is that the agreement that will be consummated on the 28th is not easily extrapolated to Euskadi if you listen to reasons as powerful as the crucial role of the PNB in ??the legislature.
The role that the Jeltzales have in Madrid has nothing to do with the UPN’s testimonial role in Congress, whose message is diluted among the harshest speeches of the opposition. The results of July 23 have made possible a convergence of interests in which only Navarre regionalists were left out of the game.
Pedro Sánchez needed the votes of the Abertzale coalition and also required the support, or at least the abstention, of President María Chivite. Bildu, meanwhile, longed to regain power in Pamplona, ??the municipal institution with the most symbolic weight for training. The motion of censure is born from this equation and has also been facilitated by the sidereal distance that separates the UPN from the PSOE, by a municipal action that has not even sought to seduce the socialists and, even, by the very profile of the future mayor of Pamplona, ??Joseba Asiron, a heterodox who publicly rejected ETA’s violence.
The main consequence for the socialists to dethrone UPN from the only important institution they maintain involved putting up with the political and media noise that is being experienced these days. However, in the case of GNP, the situation is very different. Offending the Jeltzales in the coming months and favoring an abrupt turn in the PSE’s pact policy would mean as much as endangering the legislature. The Basque nationalists would have no sympathy for putting an end to their commitments in Congress if, hypothetically, with minimally decent results, the Socialists bet to oust them together with Bildu and Podemos. Another thing would be to speculate on a Jeltzal defeat, a hypothesis that no demographic study foresees.
There are other differences regarding the Pamplona case. In Euskadi there is a tradition of understanding between PNB and PSE that goes back more than 80 years and which, although it is not without tensions, maintains a certain solidity. Historically, socialist bases have preferred pacts with GNP and there is nothing to suggest that this has changed. In the Basque government’s latest Sociometer, published this month, socialist voters give PNB a rating of 5.6, compared to 3.7 for Bildu, and 4.2 for Podemos. This certain sympathy seems to be reciprocated: Jeltzales voters give a 5.1 to the PSE and a 4.4 to Bildu. In addition, Basque nationalists and socialists share power in the main Basque institutions, so a blow to the political board after the Basque elections would jeopardize an institutional distribution involving hundreds of positions.
Obviously, the Pamplona agreement establishes a weighty precedent and will have consequences in the future. The Socialists had benefited with some recurrence from the support of the Abertzale coalition to come to power in some institutions, push forward laws and budgets, and on November 16, for the first time, their positive vote was essential for Sánchez to repeat the position (in 2019 Bildu abstained).
However, this route had not taken place in the opposite direction. In Euskadi, the PNB-PSE pact governs, and in Navarre, UPN benefited from the wall of the socialists as for Bildu. There were few precedents, such as the arrival of Xabier Alkuaz, mayor of Tafalla, to the presidency of the Navarrese Federation of Municipalities. The Pamplona agreement has another dimension and brings down the wall. Pedro Sánchez circumscribed it to the “concrete case” of the city, located “in a paralysis of blockade for five years”.
It is risky to think of an immediate change in the socialist strategy at the scale of the PSE pacts, despite the fact that it is increasingly perceived more clearly that Basque politics is entering a new scenario also marked by generational relief and changes in the correlation of forces
