Bildu: A Contradictory Party
The radical Basque separatist party was thrust into the limelight in 2018, long before it was ready from prime-time
Altos Hornos de Vizcaya’s only remaining metallurgy furnace in Sestao (Bilbao) in the Basque Country. The company, which was founded in 1902, was Spain’s largest company for much of the 20th century. It merged with other steel companies to form the Luxembourg-based Arcelor in 2002, which later merged with Mittal Steel. (Photo by Josu P - Own work, with Tomada con Pentax MZ50; 35-80, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=795937)
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Radical Basque separatist alliance Bildu is the most controversial political party in Spain. Its opponents call it “the heir of Basque Homeland and Liberty (ETA),” a former terrorist group. Its allies call it a “progressive and democratic party” and point out that ETA dissolved itself in April/May 2018.
Regular readers of Sharpen Your Axe will know that we regularly talk about the contrast between foxes (multiple models) and hedgehogs (one simplified model). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given our preference for foxes, both models are true… at least up to a point and if you squint a little. Bildu really is an heir to ETA; but it is also trying to play by the rules of the game in the contemporary era. There are tensions between both models. If we zoom out, the reality is both messy and contradictory.
Bildu was formed in the Basque Country (one of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities) by five smaller parties in 2012 to represent the region’s “patriotic left.” Its predecessor had been banned by a court ruling the year before, only to have the ban lifted shortly afterwards. Many of its first candidates had been members of Batasuna, a party that was banned in 2003 for passing state funds to ETA and justifying terrorism.
Bildu’s leader since 2016 has been Arnaldo Otegi, who is a former member of ETA, who spent time in prison for kidnapping in the late 1980s and 1990. He was also imprisoned for glorifying terrorism in the early 2000s.
In the May 2023 local and regional elections, Bildu ran 44 candidates with terrorism convictions, including seven murderers. One of the smaller parties that founded Bildu, called Sortu (also led by Bildu general secretary Otegi), regularly celebrates ETA members who have been convicted of murder, incorrectly (in my opinion) describing them as “political prisoners.” Two former terrorists who between them killed 184 people and who were released from prison in December received a celebratory tweet from Sortu. None of this should be acceptable in a democracy.
On the other hand, Bildu’s ideology combines socialism with nationalism - a surprisingly common mix in Spain. Otegi pushed ETA to look for a political solution from the late 1990s after studying philosophy in prison. Meanwhile, one of the party’s spokespeople, Oskar Matute, often condemned ETA’s violence during its reign of terror. In 2022, Bildu publicly apologised to the victims of ETA and their families.
Although the terrorist organisation killed 829 people between 1968 and 2010 (including former Socialist minister Ernest Lluch and 11 other members of the same party), it declared a definitive ceasefire in 2010. It announced a “cessation” of its armed struggle in 2011; gave up all its weapons and explosives in 2017; and dissolved all its structures in 2018.
The tide had begun to turn against ETA in the 1990s after the Spanish police seriously weakened its structure with the arrest of key figures, with the help of the French police. ETA’s lowest point came in 1997 (a year before the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland), when the murder of a centre-right local politician met with widespread condemnation, including in the Basque Country. Up to then, many opponents of terrorism in the autonomous community had often bitten their tongues, as shown in depth by novelist Fernando Aramburu.
If ETA no longer exists, shouldn’t Spanish society welcome its former supporters back into the democratic fold? An amnesty for former war criminals helped underpin the country’s transition to democracy back in the 1970s. Isn’t it positive to see people who used to believe in the armed struggle running for local elections?
In my view, the case for Bildu is better in theory than it is in practice. ETA was effectively defeated by the Spanish state. We should welcome Bildu’s apologies and attempts to play by the rules, but we shouldn’t exaggerate them. Vocal elements in Sortu continue to provide cover for convicted terrorists; and Bildu’s leaders continue to make populist critiques of the Spanish Constitution, which it implies is tainted by fascism. Its leaders are also prone to deep-state speculation to explain away any legal push-back against the party’s populist nationalism.
In a sane world, Bildu would be left to the fringes of Spanish politics to slowly sort out its own internal contradictions. The party got less than 0.8% of the national vote in 2016, which qualified it for two seats in the Basque Country. This should have put it on the fringes of the fringe. In May/June 2018, though, Pedro Sánchez - the leader of Spain’s Socialists - organised a vote of no confidence against conservative Prime Minister (PM) Mariano Rajoy after the Popular Party (PP), which was in power at the time, was engulfed in a shocking corruption scandal.
As he prepared the vote, Sánchez deliberately sought support in the fringes of Spanish politics instead of putting together a centrist alternative. He needed every vote he could muster and courted Bildu. The no-confidence vote came just three weeks after ETA had announced its dissolution and years before Bildu’s apology to the victims of terrorism, but Sánchez was blithely unconcerned by any niceties in his quest for a back-door route to power. In the end, Bildu cast its two votes for the Socialists, while making clear that this was a protest against the PP rather than a positive vote for the new PM. Sánchez entered government for the first time as a result of his deal-making.
Undeterred by Bildu’s lukewarm attitude, Sánchez has sought to make the Basque party a full member of his “Frankenstein alliance” in the following years. His shaky coalition aims to find common ground between peripheral nationalists and mainstream and populist leftists, who all hate the PP. After some serious courtship, Bildu abstained to make Sánchez PM in 2019; and voted to support his budgets for 2021 (in December 2020), for 2022 (in November 2021) and for 2023 (in November 2022). The party voted to make Sánchez PM in November 2023 after he came second in the July elections. Five votes for Sánchez and an abstention brought the party into the mainstream of Spanish politics long before it was ready for the attention.
In December 2023, the Socialist party voted to make Joseba Asiron of Bildu mayor of Pamplona, the capital city of Navarre (another autonomous community in Spain, which is next to the Basque Country - the region is known as Navarra in Spanish). Although Asiron condemned ETA in 1998, the decision to make him mayor has been wildly controversial in Spain, with much hysteria on the right. Aware of the controversy, Bildu voted with other parties to give economic support to victims of terrorism in Navarre after winning power through a no-confidence vote. The vote avoided a trap set by the outgoing mayor.
As background, Pamplona is the historical capital of the Kingdom of Navarre, which included what is now the Spanish autonomous community of the Basque Country, as well as other regions that today form parts of Spain and France. The Basque language was widely spoken in rural and mountainous areas of the kingdom, while Navarro-Aragonese was also common in the kingdom, as was Occitan, which is closely related to Catalan. Navarro-Aragonese eventually merged with Castilian Spanish, although remnants of it are still spoken in rural areas of what is today the north of Aragon (another autonomous community). Its contemporary descendant, which is only spoken by a handful of people, is today known as Aragonese.
Nowadays, some 14% of the population of Navarre are native speakers of the Basque language; and Bildu came second in the local elections with 27% of the vote. One of ETA’s main goals had been to annex Navarre into an independent Basque Country, which was also meant to include parts of southern France. Sánchez’s many critics see Socialist support for Asiron in Pamplona as the price he has to pay for Bildu’s membership in his “Frankenstein alliance” in Madrid - probably correctly.
Bildu has boomed during the Sánchez years as the Socialists and other allies have sold a vision of the separatist party as a respectable member of the left. The party received 1.4% of the national vote in July 2023, which was enough to get it six seats - a three-fold growth from the time that Sánchez first courted its support in 2018. In the local elections, in May 2023, Bildu was snapping at the heels of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), with nearly 29% of the Basque vote compared to 35% for the older party, which has staked out a position as a pragmatic establishment player.
Basque regional elections are due by July. Polls show that Bildu could overtake the PNV, although it would need the support of the Socialists to govern. If this happens, it will be very significant. The PNV is a core member of Sánchez’s “Frankenstein alliance,” but it could easily reconfigure its previous understanding with the PP, which occupies a similar place on the centre-right of the horseshoe.
The PNV has governed the Basque Country since 1979, with a brief interlude between 2009 and 2012 when the Socialists cut a deal with the PP even though the PNV won the 2009 election. Batasuna (Bildu’s predecessor as representative of the Basque “patriotic left”) was banned from running at the time. The Socialists were beaten into third place by the PNV and Bildu in 2012.
The PNV’s current understanding with Sánchez is based on pork-barrel politics - infrastructure spending in the Basque Country for votes in Madrid. This approach would no longer work if the nationalist party were out of power in its home region. The Socialists are aware of the dangers, which is why the party’s Basque leader, Eneko Andueza, has ruled out a deal with Bildu after the regional elections.
The Socialists’ recent dealmaking in Pamplona means that many observers have their doubts that Andueza’s promise will be kept, particularly when Sánchez’s impressive track record of breaking promises is taken into account. Either way, the Socialists might struggle to keep both the PNV and Bildu in their “Frankenstein alliance.” How can the PM keep both the PNV and Bildu happy as they compete for power? It seems difficult, but not necessarily impossible.
The upcoming regional elections in the Basque Country reveal the fundamental weakness of Sánchez’s strategic positioning for the long term. If Bildu is a normal progressive party, why can’t the Socialists support a Bildu-led coalition government in the Basque Country? If it is too soon after the end of ETA’s armed struggle for Bildu to enter the regional government, why did Sánchez decide to coax the party into his “Frankenstein alliance” from 2018?
Sánchez also faces major challenges in Catalonia, as discussed regularly on this blog. His hard-right separatist allies in the region recently threatened to bring down his coalition government, which lacks a majority, unless he grants them an illegal referendum on independence. As regular readers know, Articles 1, 2 and 92 of the Spanish Constitution make it hard for nationalists in the Basque Country or Catalonia to find a legal path to independence.
Meanwhile, the Spanish parliament’s in-house lawyers on Thursday said that Sánchez’s flagship policy, an amnesty for Catalan separatist politicians who held a coup attempt in 2017, would contradict Article 117.3 of the Spanish Constitution. This article says that the exercise of judicial authority is the exclusive competence of the country’s courts.
Remote Mountains
The Basque language is very different from the other languages of Spain, like Castilian Spanish, Catalan and Galician, which all derive from Vulgar Latin, as do lesser-known tongues like Navarro-Aragonese and Occitan. The Basque language is in fact entirely different from the Indo-European family, which includes all descendants of Vulgar Latin, including French and Portuguese, as well as other widely spoken languages like Bengali, English, German, Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi and Russian. Scholars believe Basque is one of the continent’s first languages, which has managed to survive in the remote mountains of northern Spain and southern France as farmers, warriors, soldiers, traders and migrants speaking related languages moved into and across Europe with their families. The Basque language has no known relatives.
Nationalists will often conclude that if a language is different, the people who speak it will also be different in some essential way. This is mathematically improbable, to put it politely, as discussed here and here. Geneticists have shown that Basque natives are broadly similar to other populations in Western Europe, with some minor differences due to the relative isolation of some of their ancestors in the region’s mountainous terrain. The similarity with other Europeans should be unsurprising to those of us who believe in the fundamental unity of humanity - an observation which is of course tempered by a great deal of diversity.
As we have seen before, though, generalising about large groups of people can be a slippery slope, which can lead to nationalists and populists classifying people like insects. Basque nationalists are also prone to this tendency.
The history of the Basque Country, like that of Catalonia, is one of a certain degree of tension between some self-governance and deep ties to the rest of Spain. In the 19th century, Basque nationalism grew out of Carlism (a right-wing Catholic ideology that emphasised local traditions rooted in the feudal era). Sabino Arana, a devout and conservative Catholic who founded the PNV in 1894, had a quasi-religious experience in 1882, when he was a teenager. He stopped being a Carlist soon afterwards and became a Basque nationalist. The ideology of nationalism had been invented in England 400 years previously.
After his conversion to nationalism, Arana learnt the Basque language as an adult (his family had switched to Spanish as its main language in previous generations) and invented a flag and national anthem for what he hoped would become a new country. He even coined the name “Basque Country” - its heartland was previously known as Biscay (or Vizcaya) and it had been a core part of the Kingdom of Navarre, as mentioned earlier in this essay. Biscay has been known for its iron-ore mines since at least Roman times and possibly longer. Activity was particularly strong between the 14th and 16th centuries.
Unfortunately, Arana was xenophobic and reactionary, not to mention being drawn to now-discredited racial theories. He contrasted allegedly pure-blood Basques with “maketos” from the rest of Spain. Many working-class Spaniards from outside the region were moving to industrial cities like Bilbao in Biscay in search of better lives by the time of his conversion, with many more to come afterwards. The invention of the Bessemer converter in the UK in 1856 had created a revolutionary way of turning iron ore into steel; and Bilbao’s industrialisation was speeding up as a result.
Henry Bessemer’s invention also paved the way for modern shipyards specialising in steel ships in Bilbao (a port city) by the beginning of the 20th century. Migration into the Basque Country from poor Spanish-speaking regions continued, with a spike in the 1950s and 1960s. It was part of a broad move from rural areas to industrial cities also including Barcelona, as discussed here. At the same time, many Basques from rural areas also emigrated to Latin America and further afield, with many going to Argentina and Uruguay in particular. Nowadays, only around a third of the population of the Basque Country are native speakers of Basque.
Despite self-identifying as a Marxist organisation, ETA inherited Arana’s concerns about outsiders and threatened many of its critics, particularly those without native Basque roots, while encouraging the children and grandchildren of migrants to voluntarily adopt a new Basque identity. The bulk of the group’s victims were members of the police and the armed forces, most of who had roots elsewhere. They were seen as an invading force - a frankly weird vision given that the territory had never been independent in recent centuries.
It is true that the Duchy of Vasconia had been independent for a few years in the Middle Ages, while the southern part of the Kingdom of Navarre was only annexed by the Kingdom of Aragon (one of the components of the dynastic union that evolved to become contemporary Spain) between 1512 and 1524. However, the region’s lack of independence for 435 years up to the foundation of ETA in 1959 makes the case for seeing the police as foreign invaders look very weak indeed, particularly after the re-establishment of Spanish democracy in 1978.
Many thousands fled from the Basque Country as a result of the violence and intimidation. Some of its critics describe the process as “ethnic cleansing.” Of course, many Spanish speakers also decided against moving to Bilbao during the decades that ETA was killing outsiders and dissidents, as well as seeking revolutionary taxes.
By now alert readers should be scratching their heads. How can a party define itself as being socialist and then glorify ethnic murderers when they are released from prison? It makes no sense at all! As I mentioned above, Sánchez thrust Bildu into the mainstream long before it had resolved its internal contradictions.
Bildu still belongs on the fringes. It needed at least a generation (25 years) from the end of ETA to get its act together as a serious player. Sánchez rushed Bildu’s integration into the mainstream in 2018 just three weeks after ETA announced its dissolution instead of giving the party until the mid-2040s or so.
Of course, Bildu is not the only populist party in Spain prone to a personality crisis. Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), another member of Sánchez’s “Frankenstein alliance,” loudly proclaims its left-wing credentials, despite having had a fascist wing in the 1930s and promoting a nationalist coup attempt in 2017. In 2018, ERC voted to make hard-right Catalan nationalist Quim Torra the region’s first minister. A man with wildly xenophobic views about Catalonia’s Spanish-speaking majority, he was quite correctly described as “pre-fascist” by more than 50 university professors.
Together We Can (Unidas Podemos), a populist-left party that is now fighting being fully absorbed into a new hard-left platform called Addition (Sumar), is not without its own contradictions. One of the party’s founders had been a neo-fascist in his youth. In 2018, members of neo-fascist party Falange complained that the new party had stolen many of its policies. UP has often acted as Sánchez’s ambassador to Bildu and ERC.
In my opinion, the tragedy of Sánchez’s “Frankenstein alliance” is that it brings the wrong people to the fore. His partners are much more worried about their tribal identities, aspirational nation-building and 19th-century ideologies than they are about actually solving real problems in a pragmatic way. The alliance lacks political capital and a wide base. The whole is less popular than the sum of its parts - a large chunk of Socialist voters tend to express their disappointment with Sánchez’s deals to pollsters when the seediness of the pork-barrel agreements becomes apparent.
Finally, let me conclude with one observation. Sánchez’s whole strategy is based on drawing a cordon sanitaire around hard-right party Vox (founded in 2013 by ultra-conservative Basque politician Santiago Abascal, who had regularly received death threats from ETA after vigorously campaigning for the unity of Spain as a PP member). At the same time, Sánchez’s Socialists also defend the likes of Bildu, ERC, UP and the communist-led Addition alliance. If the PP can find a way of distancing itself from Vox, as I discuss here, while ruthlessly focusing on Bildu’s dark side, the tide could turn in its favour.
The reason is simple: Bildu is even less popular with mainstream voters outside the Basque Country and Navarre than Vox. One of Vox’s founders was José Antonio Ortega Lara, a former prison officer from La Rioja (another autonomous community next to the Basque Country), who was kidnapped by ETA in the late 1990s and held in a cramped and inhumane space for 532 days. Since 2018, many ordinary Spanish voters have asked themselves why the party founded by Ortega Lara (a victim of terrorism) is meant to be worse than the party led by Otegi (a convicted terrorist). Sadly for Sánchez, this observation is as true for moderate voters on the centre left as it is for voters further right.
The supporters of Bildu, ERC, UP, Vox and the like can be very annoying on the internet - the comments are closed. See you next week!
Further Reading
Homeland by Fernando Aramburu (translated by Alfred MacAdam)
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