The Navarrese socialists, led by the president of the community, María Chivite, and Geroa Bai closed an agreement on Monday night to form a government together with the deputies of Contigo-Zurekin, the brand with which Podemos, IU and others were presented formations in the elections of May 28.
Uxue Barkos will maintain the second vice presidency that he already directed in the previous legislature and will also control four ministries, including Health. Instead, Geroa, cedes to Contigo / Zurekin the Housing area that in the previous term had been under his control. Barkos’s party will also be responsible for the areas of Agriculture, Livestock and the Environment and an economic vice-presidency. The Health area and this vice presidency constitute the main trophy of these negotiations for the nationalist formation.
If an agreement was not reached in three weeks, elections would have been called again, something that a priori did not want any of the forces that were sitting at the table of the Navarrese Parliament where the meeting was held until after 10 pm.
Geroa Bai – a formation in which the Navarrese PNV is integrated – convened this meeting with its eventual partners that Monday afternoon. His delegation was headed by Uxue Barkos, the party leader. Chivite instead delegated to the organization secretary and parliamentary spokesman Ramón Alzórriz.
The meeting began at 5:00 p.m. and lasted until late at night with a break of more than an hour. Geroa Bia brought to the table a counter offer to the one made by the Navarrese socialists days before 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 obtain good results in these last elections when it lost two seats while the Navarrese socialists kept theirs, 11. In the previous legislature they governed jointly. The sum of the Navarrese socialists, Geroa Bai and Contigo-Zurekin reaches 21 deputies, one more than that reached by the fifteen deputies of the force with the most votes on May 28, Unión del Pueblo Navarro –which went from 19 to 15 seats– to which must be added the three obtained by the Popular Party and the two from Vox.
Twenty one against twenty. 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 provided a week ago to favor the agreement of the nationalists and progressives and has come to raise a consultation with the bases to vote affirmatively. In any case, EH Bildu would not form part of the regional government.
Geroa Bai became the second force in Navarra and its leader, Uxue Barkos, became president of the community in 2015 with an alternative and transversal discourse that was central in the polarized politics of Navarre. Since 2019, however, the coalition has lost steam due to the push of EH Bildu – which in the elections on May 28 obtained one more deputy than in the previous legislature – and a PSOE that gains weight whenever it moves away from UPN. The Basque group has considered Chivite’s offer with an eye toward its future as a political project four years from now.
