If there is a classic that runs through all Spanish electoral battles, it is the gross manipulation of the situation in the Basque Country carried out by the People's Party (PP), which has not changed its discourse at all between the time when the armed group was murdering and sowing terror time and again, and the announcement by the terrorist organization that it had abandoned its weapons and the unilateral decree of the definitive end to its bloody activity, which it made in October 2011. The PP has instituted a discourse against reconciliation and is permanently resorting to low passions and, almost twelve years after the surrender of ETA, continues to appeal to an attitude of non-forgiveness and aims to turn the Basque Country into a quagmire which will never see the light. It is not surprising that the PP only have two mayors there, in Navaridas and Mañueta, both towns in the La Rioja Alavesa enclave. Or that it only has about fifty councillors, six MPs in the Basque Parliament and just a single Basque deputy in Congress.
If its results in the Basque Country are so poor, shouldn't it change its strategy? If it wanted to improve there, no doubt. The point is, though, that with this political action it does not intend to do this, but rather to mobilize Spanish society against a terrorism that no longer exists. The PP policy is based on mobilizing a collective imagination that still exists and pretending to be the party opposed to terrorism. Apart from some specifics, they apply the same template in Catalonia as in the Basque Country: there everything is ETA, here everything is a coup d'état. It is about creating two parallel realities in which they can take political action that projects fear by remembering the past, because the present is a very different one. And from this model they're not budging.
The original creators of this approach, José María Aznar and Jaime Mayor Oreja, should be very satisfied. Mariano Rajoy has been and gone and now Alberto Núñez Feijóo is here, both of whom were originally centred in the most central wing of the PP, and in the face of the siren songs over electoral setbacks on May 28th, they have limited themselves to copying the template of the toughest years against the terrorist group. The PP has managed to take the debate to the point it wanted and even the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has proposed reconsidering the illegalization of Bildu. In the midst of all this controversy, Bildu has announced that seven ex-members of ETA convicted of blood crimes have abandoned their places on the electoral lists. Feijóo signaled the victory and pointed out that the first step had been taken and that they would now go against the next one, referring to the other 37 convicted of crimes related to ETA who appear on the lists and who have not resigned.
No one disputes that the PP made a great sacrifice in terms of human lives ruined at the hands of the terrorist gang. But it was not the only one who paid a high price for barbarism since the 1970s when the terrorist organization was created, which ended up with 52 years of violence and 829 murders on its back. Parties, entities, associations, security forces, military, judges, liberal professionals and a long etcetera are also on this list. Catalonia also had its victims, including those of Hipercor and the long-lost Ernest Lluch. The pain was very widely suffered and it is natural that those who endured it most directly have a greater reason for irritation. But, luckily, the Basque Country has, as a whole, turned a page in a desire for a better future in which dialogue is the only pole of confrontation. And it's a pity, also an injustice, that from the outside one can try to make political capital for a handful of votes.