The censure motion in Pamplona has once again placed the news focus on Navarra politics and, in this case, on the agreement between EH Bildu and the PSOE to remove the UPN from power. The announcement of the pact that takes effect on Thursday was followed by all kinds of scandals and disqualifications on the part of the right, which in the mouth of Javier Esparza came to call the socialists “scum”. The movement in the Navarre capital, however, also invites us to analyze the role of the UPN, a formation that since losing power in 2015 has been the protagonist of a real crossing of the desert.
The beginning of this nefarious dynamic of the regionalists, who had dominated the politics of the Old Kingdom since the mid-nineties, coincided with the arrival of Javier Esparza in the leadership of UPN in 2015, although it would be unfair to hold him responsible unique to the situation. The management of his predecessor, Yolanda Barcina, weakened the formation and, above all, that year it became evident that the paradigm that had presided over Navarra politics was beginning to become obsolete.
The scheme of preponderance of UPN as the first force and, in parallel, acquiescence of the PSN to let them govern or to do so in coalition cracked in the elections of 2015. The Socialists took a beating for his agreements with the regionalists and a good part of his votes went to the Podemos space. The bass player Uxue Barkos (Geroa Bai) was appointed president, also supported by Bildu, while UPN, PP and PSN remained in the opposition.
That meant the end of a cycle and the socialists knew how to interpret it. Four years later, in 2019, María Chivite came to power, who has managed to reposition her party in the centrality of Navarre politics. UPN, on the contrary, seems to live in the nostalgia of a time that has already passed and in which it enjoyed an already exhausted capacity to condition the socialists.
In June they succeeded, perhaps for the last time, when the PSN voted blank in the investiture of Cristina Ibarrola, boosted to the mayor of Pamplona with the votes of UPN and PP. But the mayoress showed a debt to the times when they set the stage for the socialists: although she needed their support to govern, she formed a government team clearly tilted to the right, with the ultra-conservative Carlos Salvador managing Equality.
The detail is relevant because it exemplifies the difficulties of UPN to move a bit from its postulates in order to seek complicity beyond its space. “In a scene as plural as Navarrese, you are obliged to understand yourself with actors from other political spaces and for this you have to act accordingly. The sum of the right-wing parties is far from the majority and the feeling left by Esparza is that he does not have a strategy for this situation”, says Ricardo Feliú, PhD in Sociology and professor at the Public University of Navarra.
In fact, apart from the separate or coalition attempts to seek the sum of the conservative formations, when Esparza has looked at the PSOE it has been to try to condition it from Madrid and not so much to focus the speech of his party. The results have been catastrophic. In February 2022, he negotiated with the socialist wing of the Government the support of his two deputies in Congress for the labor reform, in exchange for a rapprochement with Navarre. Then, however, he did not measure his muscle well within the party and the maneuver ended in nonsense, with his two deputies in Madrid, Sergio Sayas and Carlos García Adanero, disobeying the voting discipline and, in the end, passing to the PP.
Now, the UPN leader was confident that the socialists would allow them to govern in Pamplona, ??fearful of the political and media noise that could lead to Bildu’s arrival at the mayor’s office. Since this summer, however, there has been a communion of interests that leaves out the regionalists. Pedro Sánchez and Chivite needed the support of Bildu; while the Abertzale formation yearned to regain the mayorship that Joseba Asiron already held until 2019. UPN is out of the game and Esparza can definitively confirm that the strategy of trying to condition Navarre’s socialists via Madrid is history.
At this point, the doubt remains whether the regionalist leader already has room to seek the approach of UPN to other formations from an ideological relocation and not, as he has tried, from external pressure for which he is not they have strength It would be a matter of focusing training both on the left-right axis and on the Basque-Spanish identity, looking perhaps at the precedent of CDN (Convergència de Democrates de Navarra), a party founded by the ex-leader of UPN Juan Cruz Alli on 1995
“When Esparza talked about getting along with Geroa Bai, despite the fact that he only thinks about the PNB, it can be interpreted along these lines, but at the same time he sends confusing messages and reaches agreements with the PP. F to the feeling that there is no one behind the wheel. CDN was, moreover, a party that sought to position itself in a Christian Democratic tradition, something that today has no weight in UPN”, adds Feliú.
The sociologist from Navarre believes that training “will have a very complicated time” if it is not able to read the political scenario that has taken shape in the last decade. Next year’s congress could be the right time to draw up a strategy that will allow them to get out of their labyrinth. “Otherwise, it is thrown into a position of resistance. Belligerence in speeches projects internal weakness and a lack of ability to interact with other formations”, concludes Feliú.