Basque Separatist Party A Stumbling Block For Spain's Socialist PM

Zumaia, Spain, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 16th Jul, 2023 ) :For the past five years, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has relied on the support of Basque separatist party EH Bildu, an association now hampering his bid to be re-elected next weekend.

Bildu is seen as the heir of the political arm of the disbanded armed separatist group ETA, blamed for over 850 deaths in its decades-long campaign of bombings and shootings for an independent Basque homeland.

And in the lead-up to the July 23 general election, the main opposition Popular Party (PP), which is leading in the polls, and far-right Vox routinely equate Bildu to ETA to attack the Socialist premier.

Bildu lawmakers reject the depiction made by the right of their leftist Basque separatist party.

"If Bildu was what they say it is in Madrid, even I wouldn't vote for myself," Jon Inarritu, a 44-year-old Bildu lawmaker, told AFP on the sidelines of a party rally in the Basque coastal village of Zumaia.

The village was one of many wounded by ETA's violence and the deep divisions it caused in Spain's northern Basque Country which borders France.

In 2000, a Basque business leader was killed by the organisation in this coastal village.

Seven years earlier an ETA member from Zumaia died from a fall from a window of a police station.

Weakened by Spanish and French police crackdowns, ETA in 2011 announced its decision to end attacks, and in 2018, said it had completely disbanded and ended all its activity.

"The end of the cycle of violence" was "excellent news," said Inarritu, who always condemned ETA violence during the years the group was active.

- Key votes - Five years after the end of ETA, Bildu -- whose leader Arnaldo Otegi is a convicted member of the disbanded group -- plays an increasing role in Spain's national politics.

The situation contrasts with that of Northern Ireland' Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which refuses to take the seats in Britain's parliament.

Bildu had five seats in Spain's outgoing 350-seat parliament, up from two when it first stood in a national election in 2015.

Its parliamentary votes have helped Sanchez's two-party minority coalition government pass key reforms to pensions and housing laws.

PP leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo has accused Sanchez of allowing "terrorists" to condition Spain's future with his reliance on Bildu.

During a testy tv debate with Sanchez last week, Feijoo said he would "never govern or reach agreements with the political arm" of those who killed Miguel Angel Blanco, a PP town councillor murdered by ETA in 1997.

- 'Long way to go' - The right has coined the slogan "Que te vote Txapote!" to sarcastically urge Sanchez to get votes from Francisco Javier Garcia Gaztelu, also known as "Txapote", one of ETA's most notorious assassins.

Groups that represent ETA victims are also troubled by Bildu.

They were especially angered by the inclusion of former ETA members convicted of murder on its list of electoral candidates in May regional and local elections.

"What ETA has not yet done, nor Bildu, is to ask for forgiveness," said Consuelo Ordonez, the president of the Collective of Victims of Terrorism (Covite), whose brother was murdered by Txapote in 1995.

Maria Solana, a candidate with a Basque nationalist coalition opposed to ETA called Geroa Bai -- or "Yes to the future" -- said Bildu "has made an important journey" but "it has a long way to go in this democracy".

"You don't learn to live together overnight," she told AFP in the northern city of Pamplona.