Basque Country election campaign comes to end with controversy over ETA

By Alyssa McMurtry

OVIEDO, Spain (AA) - The campaign for elections in the Spanish Basque Country comes to an end on Friday, with the final stretch marked by controversy over the ETA terror group.

Polls conducted by GAD3 on Monday suggest that EH Bildu, a left-wing nationalist party has a slight lead over the more centrist Basque Nationalist Party (PNV).

EH Bildu was formed in 2011 and was briefly banned by the Spanish Supreme Court for its links to the banned ETA-affiliated Batasuna party.

Its Secretary-General is Arnaldo Otegi, who was a convicted member of the armed group ETA which killed around 829 people during a terror campaign from 1968 to 2010.

While Otegi is not running to lead the Basque Country, the party’s candidate to lead the Basque Country, Pello Otxandiano, caused a storm of controversy when he refused to call ETA a terrorist group during an interview on Monday.

On Thursday, Otxandiano apologized for “hurting the sensitivity of ETA’s victims,” but without changing his description of ETA as an “armed group.”

He said EH Bildu is addressing the region’s “historical narrative” but that he did not want to discuss it in the context of an election campaign.

ETA officially disbanded in 2018.

Meanwhile, the PNV has governed the Basque Country nearly uninterrupted since 1980, often leading a coalition. It was only briefly in the opposition between 2009 and 2012 when it was ousted by a minority Socialist government.

In another late-campaign controversy, PNV’s candidate Imanol Pradales was attacked with pepper spray on Tuesday.

In terms of policy, during the final debate on Friday, the parties clashed over questions of the PNV’s management of healthcare, environmental policies and EH Bildu’s proposal to pacify the region’s model of policing.

The Basque Country is one of the wealthiest regions of Spain and it has the country’s lowest unemployment rate of just 6.5%.

With a strong industrial labor force, it was also home to 46% of all the strikes in Spain by the end of 2023, according to Labor Relations Council (CRL) data.

On Sunday, voters will cast their ballots for the Basque government for the first time since the summer of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was front and center of voters’ minds.