Moderate nationalists won a crucial election in Spain's Basque region yesterday as voters punished political allies of the separatist group ETA for its renewed campaign of violence.
A coalition led by the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which supports ETA's goal of independence but wants to achieve it by peaceful means, increased its strength in the 75-seat regional parliament to 33 seats from 27.
The nationalists, who have ruled the northern region uninterrupted for the past two decades, failed again to muster a 38-seat majority and must now negotiate backing from other parties to form a new government.
The election outcome was a major blow to Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, a fierce opponent of Basque self-determination who had made ousting the nationalists one of his government's top priorities.
His ruling centre-right Popular Party (PP) maintained its position as the Basque region's second largest political force thanks to its coalition with a smaller conservative party but only managed to gain a single seat for a combined 19 seats.
The PP had hoped to do well enough to form an anti-independence alliance with the Socialists but the nationalists appeared to have turned back that challenge.
But the biggest loser was Euskal Herritarrok (EH), a radical leftist party widely considered the ETA's political wing and branded by President Aznar as accomplices to terrorism.
EH lost half the 14 seats it won in a 1998 regional election during an ETA ceasefire and saw its percentage of the popular vote plunge to about 10 per cent - the lowest since Spain's return to democracy in the late 1970s.
The secretary-general of the PP Mr Javier Arenas said: "The key event of this day has been without doubt that the citizens . . . have voted against terror. They have punished terrorism at the polls."