Basque parliamentary election, 2009
Encyclopedia
Elections to the Basque regional parliament were held in the Basque Country
(a Spanish
Autonomous Community) on 1 March 2009.
Shortly before the election, two parties reportedly tied to ETA
– D3M
(Democracia 3 Millones or Demokrazia Hiru Milloi) and Askatasuna
, "Freedom" – were banned by a court ruling from standing in the election.
In stark contrast with the latest Spanish general elections, which show an increasing tendency to bipartidism, this Basque regional election increased the number of parties or electoral alliances with representation in the Basque parliament to seven, with the entrance of Union
. This places the Basque parliament at the top of the most diverse regional parliaments in Spain
, with Catalonia's and the Balearic Islands's (six each) a close second.
After nearly 30 years of constant presence in the regional executive, this election opened the door for a non-Basque Nationalist Party (PNV)-led government, since its government partners for the past decade, Eusko Alkartasuna
and Esker Batua
, fared particularly badly. The PNV managed to scoop up most of EA's support and gain an additional representative even without their former coalition partner, whose group was greatly reduced from six representatives (in the PNV-EA coalition in the 2005 election) to just one. Both the EA and EB leaders lost their seats and resigned in the aftermath of the election.
In the non-nationalist camp, the Socialists gained seven seats to garner a 25-strong caucus, an all-around good result across the three provinces but less than the 26-28 projected by some polls on election day and still far from the first-party status hoped by party leader Patxi López
. The People's Party
had switched leaders less than a year before the elections: former leader María San Gil
left citing disagreements with the national leadership and was replaced by Antonio Basagoiti, who led the party into the election and achieved 13 representatives, a net loss of two from 2005. The new national party Union, Progress and Democracy
, founded in 2007 as a response to the perceived overinfluence of nationalist parties in Spain-wide politics, managed to gain one seat in Álava
.
and Askatasuna
were banned, Basque separatists were asked to cast their vote for D3M
, whose votes would then be counted as void. Some people were arrested because they delivered door-to-door ballots and stuck cartels. According to some sources, the pro-independence Basque left (that were formerly represented by Batasuna
and later by EHAK) was surprised by the lower support of their void option. If the void votes are to be counted as the support of this option, it would have obtained the worst results in their history, having received 100,924 void votes, 50,000 less than in the previous regional election and less than half their historical top in the 1998 election
.
Major electoral analysis has been performed on the results and the issue of the void votes by pro-Basque nationalist and non-Basque nationalist parties alike. It is a frequent misunderstanding that, had the votes for the illegal lists been counted as valid, they would have been entitled to seven seats. Actually, taking into account that the average of "normal" void votes (striked-out names, double-voting, etc.) in the last three Basque parliamentary elections (1998, 2001 and 2005) was about 0,4%, and assuming that all the void votes that could not be accounted for by that statistic alone were cast for a hypothetical unitary abertzale list (instead of for two different lists, Askatasuna and D3M), those ~97,000 votes would have accounted for at most 6 seats.
Even in a Parliament already used to diversity, the election result was wide open. Respecting parliamentary convention, all parties decided to let the PNV try to form a coalition, but it was finally not able to garner a majority support:
After the nationalists' failure to build a successful coalition, the Socialist Party started its contacts. They soon secured the support of their national arch-rival, the conservative People's Party, which vowed to support him in order to oust the nationalists from government after nearly three decades of constant presence. Furthermore Union, Progress and Democracy
and Esker Batua
, with one MP each, promised not to vote against Mr. López in the investiture session. Thus, the PSE-EE had secured 38 votes in favour and two abstentions, with at most 35 MPs against, and should nothing fail, Mr. López would head the new Basque government. The confirmation of this pact caused the outrage of the PNV, which vowed to put forth its own candidate in the investiture session citing their "right" to head the government as the top-voted party.
The conditions of the pact between the socialist and the conservatives were a matter of constant speculation in the whole of Spain for most of March, with the issue being raised in many political talk show
s and press editorial
s. Many radicals from both parties claimed that the other would just use their coalition partner, effectively diluting their core ideology. As the negotiation advanced, PP leader Antonio Basagoiti made it clear that he would not request positions in the new Government, acknowledging the PSE-EE wish to form a minority government with external support from his party. He vowed to provide stability to the new executive, and attacked the "shamelessness" of PNV outcries, citing that the Álava
provincial government was headed by the PNV itself which had only been the third party in the last election. Finally it was decided that the PP would head the Basque Parliament and refrain from moving or supporting any vote of no confidence, while the Socialists would form a minority government on their own and treat the PP as their "preferred" coalition partner, rejecting deals with other parties that went against their "main" one with the conservatives.
The final deal was ratified by both parties and leaked to the public in the last days of March, with its formal signature being performed by the negotiation teams on April 1. The new Parliament assembled on April 3 and elected its bureau, with PP MP Arantza Quiroga as its Speaker and two PSE-EE members ensuring a majority in the 5-member organ. The investiture session for the new Lehendakari, for which both López and the incumbent Ibarretxe stood, was held on May 5. Mr. López was elected Lehendakari of the Basque Country on a 39-35 vote and was sworn in two days later at the Gernika House of Assemblies.
Basque Country (autonomous community)
The Basque Country is an autonomous community of northern Spain. It includes the Basque provinces of Álava, Biscay and Gipuzkoa, also called Historical Territories....
(a Spanish
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
Autonomous Community) on 1 March 2009.
Shortly before the election, two parties reportedly tied to ETA
ETA
ETA , an acronym for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna is an armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization. The group was founded in 1959 and has since evolved from a group promoting traditional Basque culture to a paramilitary group with the goal of gaining independence for the Greater Basque Country...
– D3M
D3M
Demokrazia Hiru Milioi was an electoral platform which was formed to participate in the Basque Parliament elections in 2009. It was declared illegal on February 8, 2009, as the Supreme Court of Spain considered that it was linked with the separatist organization ETA....
(Democracia 3 Millones or Demokrazia Hiru Milloi) and Askatasuna
Askatasuna
Askatasuna is a Basque political party registered on the 31st August, 1998, outlawed in 2009....
, "Freedom" – were banned by a court ruling from standing in the election.
Results
Union, Progress and Democracy
Union, Progress and Democracy is a Spanish political party founded in September 2007.It is a progressivist party, between social democracy and social liberalism. One of its goals is to build a federal system for Spain and European Union, with clear responsibilities distributed among local...
. This places the Basque parliament at the top of the most diverse regional parliaments in Spain
Autonomous communities of Spain
An autonomous community In other languages of Spain:*Catalan/Valencian .*Galician .*Basque . The second article of the constitution recognizes the rights of "nationalities and regions" to self-government and declares the "indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation".Political power in Spain is...
, with Catalonia's and the Balearic Islands's (six each) a close second.
After nearly 30 years of constant presence in the regional executive, this election opened the door for a non-Basque Nationalist Party (PNV)-led government, since its government partners for the past decade, Eusko Alkartasuna
Eusko Alkartasuna
Eusko Alkartasuna is a Basque nationalist political party operating in Spain and France. The Basque language name means Basque Solidarity and abbreviated as EA. The party describes itself as a Basque nationalist, democratic, popular, progressive and non-denominational party...
and Esker Batua
United Left (Spain)
The United Left is a political coalition that was organized in 1986 bringing together several political organisations opposed to Spain joining NATO. It was formed by a number of groups of leftists, greens, left-wing socialists and republicans, but was dominated by the Communist Party of Spain...
, fared particularly badly. The PNV managed to scoop up most of EA's support and gain an additional representative even without their former coalition partner, whose group was greatly reduced from six representatives (in the PNV-EA coalition in the 2005 election) to just one. Both the EA and EB leaders lost their seats and resigned in the aftermath of the election.
In the non-nationalist camp, the Socialists gained seven seats to garner a 25-strong caucus, an all-around good result across the three provinces but less than the 26-28 projected by some polls on election day and still far from the first-party status hoped by party leader Patxi López
Patxi López
Francisco Javier López Álvarez is a Spanish socialist politician and the current president of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country...
. The People's Party
People's Party (Spain)
The People's Party is a conservative political party in Spain.The People's Party was a re-foundation in 1989 of the People's Alliance , a party led and founded by Manuel Fraga Iribarne, a former Minister of Tourism during Francisco Franco's dictatorship...
had switched leaders less than a year before the elections: former leader María San Gil
María San Gil
María San Gil Noain is a Spanish Basque politician.Born in San Sebastián, San Gil graduated with a degree in Trilingual Biblical Philology from the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca. In 1991 she began working for the San Sebastián city council, representing the conservative Partido Popular...
left citing disagreements with the national leadership and was replaced by Antonio Basagoiti, who led the party into the election and achieved 13 representatives, a net loss of two from 2005. The new national party Union, Progress and Democracy
Union, Progress and Democracy
Union, Progress and Democracy is a Spanish political party founded in September 2007.It is a progressivist party, between social democracy and social liberalism. One of its goals is to build a federal system for Spain and European Union, with clear responsibilities distributed among local...
, founded in 2007 as a response to the perceived overinfluence of nationalist parties in Spain-wide politics, managed to gain one seat in Álava
Álava
Álava is a province of Spain and a historical territory of the Basque Country, heir of the ancient Lord of Álava. Its capital city is Vitoria-Gasteiz which is also the capital of the autonomous community...
.
| Party or electoral coalition | Party list votes | Vote percentage (change) | Total Seats (change) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basque Nationalist Party Basque Nationalist Party The Basque National Party is the largest and oldest Basque nationalist party. It is currently the largest political party in the Basque Autonomous Community also with a minor presence in Navarre and a marginal one in the French Basque Country... (EAJ-PNV) |
396,557 | 38.56% | −0.11% | 30 | +8 | |
| Socialist Party of the Basque Country (PSE-EE) | 315,893 | 30.71% | +8.03% | 25 | +7 | |
| People's Party People's Party (Spain) The People's Party is a conservative political party in Spain.The People's Party was a re-foundation in 1989 of the People's Alliance , a party led and founded by Manuel Fraga Iribarne, a former Minister of Tourism during Francisco Franco's dictatorship... (PP) |
144,944 | 14.09% | −3.31% | 13 | −2 | |
| Aralar Aralar Party Aralar is a Basque socialist and separatist political party in Spain. The party is led by Patxi Zabaleta. It is opposed to the violent struggle of ETA.... |
62,214 | 6.05% | +3.72% | 4 | +3 | |
| Eusko Alkartasuna Eusko Alkartasuna Eusko Alkartasuna is a Basque nationalist political party operating in Spain and France. The Basque language name means Basque Solidarity and abbreviated as EA. The party describes itself as a Basque nationalist, democratic, popular, progressive and non-denominational party... (EA) |
37,820 | 3.68% | 1 | −6 | ||
| Basque United Left – The Greens United Left (Spain) The United Left is a political coalition that was organized in 1986 bringing together several political organisations opposed to Spain joining NATO. It was formed by a number of groups of leftists, greens, left-wing socialists and republicans, but was dominated by the Communist Party of Spain... (EB-IU) |
36,134 | 3.51% | −1.86% | 1 | −2 | |
| Progress and Democracy Union (UPyD) | 22,002 | 2.14% | +2.14% | 1 | +1 | |
| All Others | 1.26% | +0.16% | 0 | — | ||
| Totals | 100.00% | 75 | — |
2013 >Results counting void votes
After D3MD3M
Demokrazia Hiru Milioi was an electoral platform which was formed to participate in the Basque Parliament elections in 2009. It was declared illegal on February 8, 2009, as the Supreme Court of Spain considered that it was linked with the separatist organization ETA....
and Askatasuna
Askatasuna
Askatasuna is a Basque political party registered on the 31st August, 1998, outlawed in 2009....
were banned, Basque separatists were asked to cast their vote for D3M
D3M
Demokrazia Hiru Milioi was an electoral platform which was formed to participate in the Basque Parliament elections in 2009. It was declared illegal on February 8, 2009, as the Supreme Court of Spain considered that it was linked with the separatist organization ETA....
, whose votes would then be counted as void. Some people were arrested because they delivered door-to-door ballots and stuck cartels. According to some sources, the pro-independence Basque left (that were formerly represented by Batasuna
Batasuna
Batasuna was a Basque nationalist political party based mainly in Spain, where it was outlawed in 2003, after a court ruling declared proven that the party was financing ETA with public money. Batasuna is included in the "European Union list of terrorist persons and organizations" as a component...
and later by EHAK) was surprised by the lower support of their void option. If the void votes are to be counted as the support of this option, it would have obtained the worst results in their history, having received 100,924 void votes, 50,000 less than in the previous regional election and less than half their historical top in the 1998 election
Basque parliamentary election, 1998
Elections to the Parliament of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain, were held on October 25, 1998.The Basque Nationalist Party won 21 seats, the People`s Party came second with 16 seats, the Batasuna party under the name Euskal Herritarrok and the Socialist Party of the Basque...
.
Major electoral analysis has been performed on the results and the issue of the void votes by pro-Basque nationalist and non-Basque nationalist parties alike. It is a frequent misunderstanding that, had the votes for the illegal lists been counted as valid, they would have been entitled to seven seats. Actually, taking into account that the average of "normal" void votes (striked-out names, double-voting, etc.) in the last three Basque parliamentary elections (1998, 2001 and 2005) was about 0,4%, and assuming that all the void votes that could not be accounted for by that statistic alone were cast for a hypothetical unitary abertzale list (instead of for two different lists, Askatasuna and D3M), those ~97,000 votes would have accounted for at most 6 seats.
Aftermath
- A PNV-PSE government would have enjoyed the support of 55 MPs out of 75 and the support of part of the socialist and most of the nationalist bases. However, PSE-EE leader Patxi LópezPatxi LópezFrancisco Javier López Álvarez is a Spanish socialist politician and the current president of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country...
requested that he become the new Lehendakari, citing the 1986 precedentBasque parliamentary election, 1986Elections to the Parliament of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain, were held on November 30, 1986.The Socialists won 19 seats, the Basque Nationalist Party came second with 17 seats, the Batasuna party and Eusko Alkartasuna each won 13 seats, and Euskadiko Ezkerra won 9 seats.-...
in which the PSE won more seats but let the PNV chair the coalition government on account of the latter having received more votes. This terms were unacceptable to PNV candidate and incumbent Lehendakari Juan José IbarretxeJuan José IbarretxeJuan José Ibarretxe Markuartu is a Basque politician of Spain. A leading member of the Basque Nationalist Party , he was President of Spain's Basque Country autonomous community from January 2, 1999 to May 7, 2009....
and the PNV as a whole, who expressed its "outrage" at the demands of Mr. López's formation. - A PNV-PP government would have secured 43 MPs. While unseen in the Basque Country, the People's Party has indeed acted as a junior coalition partner in Catalonia, where it supported the previously-regionalist CiUConvergència i UnióConvergence and Union is a centre-right electoral alliance in Catalonia, Spain. CiU is technically a federation of two constituent parties, the larger Democratic Convergence of Catalonia and its smaller counterpart, the Democratic Union of Catalonia . It is currently led by Artur Mas, who is the...
until the 2003 election. Nevertheless, PP leader Antonio Basagoiti rejected the pact, remarking that the PNV should leave the government if only for the sake of democracy and alternance. - A minority PNV government, either with or without its recent allies EA and EB was not an option, since even with the support of the other nationalist party, AralarAralar PartyAralar is a Basque socialist and separatist political party in Spain. The party is led by Patxi Zabaleta. It is opposed to the violent struggle of ETA....
, the coalition would be limited to 36 MPs against the previsible rejection of the other 39.
Union, Progress and Democracy
Union, Progress and Democracy is a Spanish political party founded in September 2007.It is a progressivist party, between social democracy and social liberalism. One of its goals is to build a federal system for Spain and European Union, with clear responsibilities distributed among local...
and Esker Batua
United Left (Spain)
The United Left is a political coalition that was organized in 1986 bringing together several political organisations opposed to Spain joining NATO. It was formed by a number of groups of leftists, greens, left-wing socialists and republicans, but was dominated by the Communist Party of Spain...
, with one MP each, promised not to vote against Mr. López in the investiture session. Thus, the PSE-EE had secured 38 votes in favour and two abstentions, with at most 35 MPs against, and should nothing fail, Mr. López would head the new Basque government. The confirmation of this pact caused the outrage of the PNV, which vowed to put forth its own candidate in the investiture session citing their "right" to head the government as the top-voted party.
The conditions of the pact between the socialist and the conservatives were a matter of constant speculation in the whole of Spain for most of March, with the issue being raised in many political talk show
Talk show
A talk show or chat show is a television program or radio program where one person discuss various topics put forth by a talk show host....
s and press editorial
Editorial
An opinion piece is an article, published in a newspaper or magazine, that mainly reflects the author's opinion about the subject. Opinion pieces are featured in many periodicals.-Editorials:...
s. Many radicals from both parties claimed that the other would just use their coalition partner, effectively diluting their core ideology. As the negotiation advanced, PP leader Antonio Basagoiti made it clear that he would not request positions in the new Government, acknowledging the PSE-EE wish to form a minority government with external support from his party. He vowed to provide stability to the new executive, and attacked the "shamelessness" of PNV outcries, citing that the Álava
Álava
Álava is a province of Spain and a historical territory of the Basque Country, heir of the ancient Lord of Álava. Its capital city is Vitoria-Gasteiz which is also the capital of the autonomous community...
provincial government was headed by the PNV itself which had only been the third party in the last election. Finally it was decided that the PP would head the Basque Parliament and refrain from moving or supporting any vote of no confidence, while the Socialists would form a minority government on their own and treat the PP as their "preferred" coalition partner, rejecting deals with other parties that went against their "main" one with the conservatives.
The final deal was ratified by both parties and leaked to the public in the last days of March, with its formal signature being performed by the negotiation teams on April 1. The new Parliament assembled on April 3 and elected its bureau, with PP MP Arantza Quiroga as its Speaker and two PSE-EE members ensuring a majority in the 5-member organ. The investiture session for the new Lehendakari, for which both López and the incumbent Ibarretxe stood, was held on May 5. Mr. López was elected Lehendakari of the Basque Country on a 39-35 vote and was sworn in two days later at the Gernika House of Assemblies.