Tens of thousands yesterday attended mobilizations in five Basque cities demanding a referendum on the political future of the Basque Country. Grassroots organizing group Gure Esku Dago spokespeople Zelai Nikolas and Angel Oiarbide said "the stage of decision" should now be reached after Basques demanded the vote for the second year in a row, after some 150,000 people joined hands in a 123-km long human chain in June 2014.

"This people must build its own ballot box in order to be able to decide", Nikolas and Oiarbide said, as they insisted that both the contents of the new political status for the Basque Country and the pace for its implementation must be in the hands of citizens.

In order to symbolize that, one of yesterday's central events was the formation of human chains in Bilbao, San Sebastián, Vitoria, Pamplona and Bayonne, each one holding long lenghts of cloth that had been sewn across the Basque Country over the last year.

The cloths were used to build large-scale ballot boxes. Demonstrators hope they will become the prelude for real ballot boxes in a future referendum.

Pro-independence party coalition Bildu supported yesterday's mobilization. Some members of pro-sovereignty Basque Nationalist Party (EAJ-PNV) did so as well, although their party kept some distance with Gure Esku Dago's initiative.

Bildu wants a referendum on independence to be held at some point in the near future. Meanwhile, EAJ-PNV wants Basque political parties -both pro-independence and pro-union- to agree on a new political status with enlarged autonomy for the Basque Country. The deal would then be submitted to popular vote.

Two-year mobilization

The Gure Esku Dago mobilization was unveiled two years ago aiming at spreading three core ideas: the Basque Country is a nation, it has the right to decide its own political future, and that future is in the hands of citizens.

(Image: large-scale, cloth-made ballot box being built yesterday / Photo: Gure Esku Dago).