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Basque Nationalist Party wins in Euskadi but Socialist candidate is better placed to become president

 
Banning of pro-independence parties has left void more than one hundred thousand votes and allows Spanish nationalist parties to form majority in the Basque Parliament for the first time · Ibarretxe’s party wins 8 seats more, while Socialists and Aralar gain 6 and 3 more · UPyD gets its first seat ever.

A new political stage is about to begin in the Basque Country. The results of the elections for the autonomous parliament confirm several changes that will play a crucial role to settle the Basque conflict. Elections have been deeply marked by the forced absence of the leftist pro-independence lists, which were banned by the Supreme Court on the grounds that they belong to the "entourage of ETA and Batasuna". As a consequence, the Socialist candidate Patxi López (PSE) is more likely to be sworn in as lehendakari (president of the Basque Country) because, even though he got only 24 seats, will probably get the support of the Popular Party (PP, 13 seats), whereas the winner, Ibarretxe's PNV (Basque Nationalist Party), with 30 seats, has been left with no suficient political support due to the collapse of former allies. Thus UpyD, a new Spanish nationalist party, will have the tie-breaking vote to the presidency between autonomist and pro-independence parties (PNV, 30 seats; Aralar, 4 seats; EA, 2 seats, and EB, 1 seat) and the Spanish front made up of Socialists and right wing PP. Both sides amount to 37 seats.

Apart from PNV and PSE, Aralar (Batasuna splinter group in favour of socialism and independence and against armed struggle) has been the other winning party, as it has got 4 seats instead of 1 it won in 2005. It has become, then, the second largest Basque nationalist party in Parliament after beating EA (Eusko Alkartasuna), which has obtained 2 seats instead of the 7 it got four years ago, and EB (from 3 to 1 seat).

Patxi López, who declared he "feels vindicated to become next lehendakari", will take office if PP and UPyD give him parliamentary support. Ibarretxe, though, has not renounced the presidency and announced he will hold talks with "all parties" to form a PNV-led government.

Leftist pro-independence movement, excluded
Members of the leftist pro-independence lists banned by the Spanish judiciary have been handing out D3M ballots -one of the prohibited parties- in spite of knowing they would be counted as void votes. In the end, the total number of void votes has amounted to 101,000. Gara newspaper has calculated how many seats that would represent and concluded that D3M would have gained 7 seats, 2 less than the seats obtained by the abertzale Communist Party of the Basque Lands (EHAK) in 2005, and would have been the fourth political party in the assembly.

Picture: two main candidates to lehendakari, Juan José Ibarretxe (PNV) and Patxi López (PSE).

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