THE LATEST Basque pro-independence franchise, the coalition Bildu, packed out Pamplona’s Anaitasuna football stadium on Saturday night. The speakers were launching their campaign for local and provincial elections, coming up on May 22nd.
Until midnight two days earlier, however, the organisation did not know whether it would be permitted to run candidates at all. The supreme court declared last month that Bildu was a front for Batasuna, the radical party banned eight years ago for links to the terrorist group Eta, and ruled its electoral lists illegal.
Bildu immediately appealed to the constitutional court. On Thursday, it lifted that ban by a margin of six votes to five. Basque nationalists of all stripes were delighted, and the governing Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) was probably privately relieved at a decision that removes a shadow from Spanish democracy.
However, the main opposition party, the hard-right Partido Popular (PP) responded with angry and strident comments. Its justice spokesman Federico Trillo said the court had lost the confidence – in this order – of the Guardia Civil, the police, and of “all Spanish citizens”.
The politicisation and polarisation of the Spanish justice system is nothing new. Nor is it new that surrogates of Batasuna should be banned. Almost a dozen new parties have been excluded from elections since the original 2003 sentence, which has been endorsed by the European Court of Human Rights. But there are two distinctly new elements in this controversy. Firstly, Batasuna’s political discourse has changed almost beyond recognition since Eta brutally ended its 2006 ceasefire by bombing Madrid airport, killing two people.
Former hawks among radicals have become doves, as popular support for Eta in its former fiefdoms plummeted, and its military capacity collapsed. So much so that the group’s latest ceasefire, declared last year, now seems almost marginal in current debates. Last February, Batasuna veterans launched a new party, Sortu. Its statutes were extraordinarily explicit in rejecting Eta’s violence. The subsequent banning of Sortu – still under appeal today – angered many Basques who never sympathised with Eta.
Every time Batasuna tried to conform to democratic norms, they said, the government or the courts changed the rules.
So two small pro-independence parties with unstained democratic records, Eusko Alkartasuna and Alternatiba, agreed to form a coalition with “independents”, many of whom were linked to Batasuna. They felt that Batasuna voters, who once made up almost 20 per cent of Basque voters, should no longer be denied the right to vote for candidates of their choice.
So the banning of Bildu marked a new and dangerous departure for Spanish justice, because it eliminated not only Batasuna supporters, but two unquestionably democratic parties, from the democratic process.
Ironically, the whole process has transformed the image of Batasuna in the Basque nationalist world. The party began the year as a pariah, forced to jump through every hoop Madrid put in front of it. It now lives again through Bildu, able to present itself as a champion of democratic values.