Despite Vote, Solutions Evade Basques

Basque voters have cast their ballots against violence and for dialogue with the armed separatist group ETA, but few people in the region expect to see progress on either front any time soon.

The moderate Basque Nationalist Party, advocate of negotiations to end the ETA’s terror campaign, won 33 seats in the 75-member Basque legislature in Sunday’s regional election--far more than Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s Popular Party, which rejects talks.

But the Popular Party’s failure to unseat the 20-year-old nationalist government is not going to weaken Aznar’s opposition to negotiations, political analysts said. And the Basque nationalists cannot make peace without the central government in Madrid.

Although the ETA’s political allies saw their share of the vote plunge to a record low, the armed group is unlikely to halt the bombings and killings that voters repudiated.

“Basque society has the same problems and challenges today as it had before the election,” said Pedro Luis Arias, an activist in the peace group Gesto por la Paz. “Among the problems, the most important one is violence, the lives and security of all the people ETA attacks or tries to kill.”

Whether casting ballots for Basque nationalist or pro-Spanish parties, voters said the central issue of this election was how to deal with the ETA’s pursuit of independence by violent means.

The Basque Country has an autonomous parliament, police force, health and education systems and tax collection. Madrid still controls security forces, foreign policy, border crossings and all air and sea ports--powers that many nationalists would like an independent Basque state to assume through peaceful means.

Most Basques are appalled that the ETA, whose Basque initials stand for Basque Homeland and Freedom, has killed about 800 people in its war for independence, 30 of them since ending a truce in December 1999. Those bloody 17 months clearly cost Euskal Herritarrok, the party widely considered to be the ETA’s political wing, 80,000 votes and seven of its 14 seats in parliament.

But rejection is not the message the radical nationalists have taken from the poll. They claim their voters made a strategic decision to cast their ballots for the Basque Nationalist Party in order to defeat the challenge from the Popular Party and its ally in this race, the opposition Socialist Party. Those are “lent”--not lost--votes, ETA supporters say.

The group is not about to make concessions to a popular will it does not acknowledge. It is likely to continue bombing and killing opponents of Basque independence as if nothing had happened in Sunday’s vote.

“ETA does not live in reality,” Arias said. “If you are connected to the real world in Western Europe in the 21st century, you must agree that a strategy of violence cannot possibly gain political objectives. The only way to explain ETA is that they live outside the real world.”

Aznar’s Popular Party hoped to beat the moderate nationalists by promising a crackdown on the ETA. The party’s Basque leader, former Interior Minister Jaime Mayor Oreja, argued that the way to confront terror is with more police.

That strategy gained just one additional seat for the Popular Party, compared with six new seats for the Basque Nationalist Party, whose leader, Juan Jose Ibarretxe, will resume the presidency of the Basque government.

But Popular Party supporters also see victory in defeat. They note that they gained 56,000 votes compared with the last election, in 1998.

“The Popular Party is not willing to take one step backward, nor should it,” said Inaki Ezkerra, a writer and founder of Foro Ermua, an organization assisting victims of violence. “On the contrary, it is strengthened as a true alternative. It should not change but continue to move forward.”

Some political analysts add that although the hard-line policy was defeated in the Basque Country, it is popular nationally.

The Basque Nationalist Party, meanwhile, needs to come up with a recipe for governing the polarized Basque Country and for pursuing its mandate for negotiations.

The party, known by its Spanish initials PNV, hoped to convince the Socialist Party to form a unity government. The two were partners for more than a decade until 1998, when the nationalists adopted a more pro-independence position.

But Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Monday that his party would remain in opposition in the Basque parliament.

“The Socialist Party will exercise responsible and constructive opposition in the Basque parliament,” Rodriguez Zapatero told a news conference in Madrid. He said conditions were not right for an alliance, although he left the door open for further talks.

During the campaign, the Socialists said they would not back the PNV as long as it challenged Spain’s constitutional obstacles to independence.

The PNV wants the Spanish government to follow Northern Ireland’s example of all-party talks. Although no one was racing to the bargaining table in the aftermath of the election, some analysts suggest that both the ETA and the government will have to rethink their strategies.

“ETA always has a double discourse,” said Gorka Espiau, a Basque political analyst for the Spanish newspaper El Correo. “Publicly, they will say this does not affect them, and they will try to demonstrate that. . . . But in the end it has to influence them. Half their people have given them a strong punishment.”

Espiau said Aznar also will find it increasingly difficult to ignore the will of the Basque people, who want an end to the violence and are willing to negotiate with the ETA to get it.