In my last article on April 25, I used the election results from the Basque Country as an opportunity to ask various questions and noted, among other things, that „although I am not familiar with the Basque Country, I am more familiar with Catalonia and Valencia.“ In this article, I used simple research to describe both Basque victorious parties as separatist. This provoked harsh criticism.

I am therefore quoting a letter I received from a reader. I leave it to each reader to judge the question of the separatist nature of the Basque party in question, the PNV. This question is completely irrelevant to the issues raised in the article itself, but I do not want to give the impression that I am working with false or insufficiently researched assertions.

Letter from Jaime

Dear Helmut,

The BNP (PNV) has historically had two factions and souls. One is separatist and the other „autonomist“

The autonomist wing defeated the separatist wing since long ago. Their praxis has been usually similar to that of the Bavarian CSU; getting the most out of any central (federal) government for their region and collaborating with the central government in enacting national (and not only regional) legislation. Spain´s recently approved social security reformed law was to a large extent co drafted by the (socialist) government together with the Basque Nationalist Party (and subsequently voted in Congress by a majority)

The PNV have been practicing this sort of „pragmatic autonomism“ for no less than 30 years. By the way during most of the democratic period (since 1978) they have governed the Basque Country in coalition with the socialist party, which is also evidence of the PNV not being „separatist“. During a short period in the 1990s one of their leaders (Ibarreche) tried coming up with a new Basque constitution obtaining more autonomy (without acting like Puigdemont who acted unilaterally) having had the courage of presenting it to the Spanish congress where it was rejected. Later on, the BNP fired Ibarreche and appointed a more „Spain-friendly“ leader. During a period the PNV lost the government of the region, the president of the Basque country having been a socialist (Patxi Lopez), hence not a nationalist. Later on the PNV won the elections again and the new president was an even more moderate guy, also forming (again) a coalition government with the socialists.

Presenting the PNV as a „separatist“ party is far from the truth (especially since not more than 20-23% of Basques support independence most of them voting for Bildu).

Best regards,

Jaime