In a record 80 per cent turnout the people of the Basque Country have shown clearly that they want to be governed by a nationalist government and not a non-nationalist one sent in from Madrid.
When the final results were counted late on Sunday night the moderate Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) became the clear winner with 33 seats, 12 more than it had in the outgoing parliament and bringing it only five away from the 38 seats needed for an overall majority in the 75-seat parliament in Vitoria.
The greatest disappointment was that of the Popular Party (PP) who believed it had a chance of ousting the PNV for the first time in 20 years. In the event, with 19 seats, it had only three seats more than in 1998, and even if it formed an alliance with the Socialists - who lost one seat from 14 to 13 - it would still be one seat behind PNV's 33 seats.
"PP came in like a colonial conqueror. They have been made to pay for their condescending attitude," said a Madrid-based Basque lawyer, Ms Marta Cebreros. She accuses the state-run TV of biased coverage. The bitterly fought campaign became a battle between nationalists, who have governed in the region since 1980, and the nonnationalist Madrid-based PP and PSE parties, sometimes called the Constitutionalists.
But PP should perhaps have read the writing on the wall. One week before the election it tried to suppress an opinion poll carried out by the state-run organisation CIS, alleging "technical problems".
When the CIS poll was eventually leaked last Wednesday, it predicted a close finish between PNV and PP, but delivered a crushing condemnation of the PP candidate and former interior minister, Mr Jaime Mayor Oreja. It placed him way down the popularity ratings, below nearly all the other candidates, virtually tying with Euskal Herritarrok (EH) leader Mr Arnaldo Otegi.
Mr Mayor now faces a great dilemma. He resigned from his ministerial post to head the PP campaign and he must decide whether he stays in his native Basque Country to devote himself to regional politics or swallows his pride and comes back to Madrid to an uncertain future. Certainly, the greatest loser was EH, the political front for ETA. It received a resounding defeat from a country tired of terrorist violence. EH, or in its previous incarnation Herri Batasuna (HB), had the worst results of any election since 1980. It lost 100,000 votes and saw its parliamentary presence fall from 14 to only seven seats.
Three years. ago when EH won almost 18 per cent of the vote, the country was revelling in the euphoria of the ceasefire and Sunday's defeat can be seen as a punishment to the terrorists for ending the 14-month truce.
Mr Otegi denied the anti-ETA vote and blamed the Madridbased parties for their electoral fiasco. "Many independendistas decided that the most efficient way of achieving their aims was to vote against Spain by voting for PNV," he said yesterday.
"EH must take stock of these results and learn from their defeat," said Mr Inaki Anasagasti, the PNV parliamentary spokseman. He said he was confident that PNV will form a government, and if EH maintains the parliamentary boycott it began last September, the chamber would have 68 deputies, with only 34 needed for the absolute majority. Mr Ibarretxe, the PNV leader, who will almost certainly head that new government, said: "The voters have said No to death and Yes to peace. We must sit down and talk like civilised humans and not animals. This will be a legislature of dialogue and peace."
Two important lessons can be learned from these election results. The people have shown ETA that they will no long tolerate violence, and the Madrid government must seriously reconsider its tough policy against ETA - the vote for PNV showed that the majority of Basques favour dialogue as a way to ending terrorism.