21-A in Euskadi: the least state campaign of 2024

The elections in Galicia were a test for the internal leadership of Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the Catalan elections on May 12 will examine the success of the policy deployed by Pedro Sánchez with the amnesty and will measure the viability of the legislature. And, in between, the electoral campaign for the elections being held this Sunday in Euskadi has tiptoed through current state politics.

Only the entanglement of the EH Bildu candidate, Pello Otxandiano, with his resistance to classifying ETA as a terrorist organization, an issue that was surprisingly the socialists who put on the table this time, has permeated the discourse of national leaders in the last section of the campaign. “You have to call things by their name and ETA was not an armed band any more than it was a national liberation movement, as Aznar said at the time. It was a terrorist gang defeated by Spanish democracy,” Pedro Sánchez began to assess from Brussels on Thursday.

With all eyes focused on whether EH Bildu will manage to become the leading political force and defeat the PNV in votes and seats for the first time, expectations regarding the governability of Euskadi contain less suspense than in other electoral events and, therefore, priori also less impact for state-based political forces, with no aspirations to be winners of the elections.

Historically, for the PP, Euskadi is one of the autonomous areas that are impregnable. And that is why their prospects are limited to emerging from the irrelevance in which they were mired after the 2020 elections, when in coalition with Ciudadanos they obtained the worst result in their history: five deputies and just 6.75% of the votes.

For the PSOE, expectations focus on repeating a scenario similar to that of four years ago. Assuming that they are not even in a position to compete for second place, the socialists are banking on them re-squaring the numbers to repeat a coalition executive with the PNV, now with Imanol Pradales at the helm. A scenario that most pre-election polls show as feasible.

The presence of the President of the Government in Euskadi these fifteen days has been testimonial. Sánchez accompanied the socialist candidate, Eneko Andueza, at the campaign closing rally on Friday in Bilbao. And he alone had attended two more events, one in Donostia and another in Vitoria. Yes, other leaders of the PSOE in the Basque Country have been more involved, such as the former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero or the former Lehendakari, Patxi López, current parliamentary spokesperson.

With the legislature fallow due to the spring electoral race that links the Basque, Catalan and European elections, Sánchez has barely visited Euskadi on the campaign trail and is focused on his international agenda. More specifically, in his strategic commitment to Spanish international politics: leading at the European level the immediate recognition of the Palestinian State as a preliminary step to a peace process in the Middle East.

In Euskadi, the socialists assume that they will be the third political force. The expectations are to reissue the coalition government with the PNV even if the victory of EH Bildu is confirmed. Since the beginning of the campaign, the Basque socialists have insisted on their refusal to support any political equation that implies the governability of the nationalist left. Something that has even been influenced in the final stretch of the campaign as a result of the contradictions of EH Bildu to expressly condemn ETA terrorism.

Euskadi, pending subject of the PP

The PP campaign in Euskadi has been the opposite of that of the Galician elections last February. Feijóo turned to his old fiefdom to help his successor, Alfonso Rueda, maintain the absolute majority that he himself achieved four consecutive times. The national leader of the PP organized a caravan parallel to that of the candidate and, except for the days when due to parliamentary obligations he had to be in Madrid, the rest of the time he spent touring Galicia from event to event.

Two months later, Feijóo has starred in six events in Euskadi, half of them in the last two days of the campaign. And not for lack of time. In the last two weeks, the leader of the PP has taken the opportunity to travel to other places in Spain, with special attention to Catalonia where there will be elections again in a month. And there, yes, Feijóo has a lot at stake.

In January, Feijóo marked the PP's electoral objectives for 2024: retain Galicia, improve until they become essential in Euskadi and win the European elections. The first point was achieved, but the second seems to be a long way off. The Basque PP, with Javier de Andrés at its head, far from becoming essential, is now content to emerge from the irrelevance of its current six deputies. A purpose that they saw as feasible, but that has been deflated for days.

Not even the slippage of the EH Bildu candidate, which has allowed the issue of ETA to be brought into the campaign, seems to allow the PP to reverse the trend. Feijóo has at the same time played to attract the PNV for future pacts while attacking it to fish in its fishing grounds and has attacked the PSE for its agreements with the nationalist left, all so that the polls indicate that it will continue, more or less, as in the last decade: with little to say in Euskadi.

The split of the left is measured at the polls

The space that until now was organized around Elkarrekin Podemos in Euskadi, and which brought together the vote of the non-independence left, appears divided this time. The surveys do not agree on the weight that Sumar, Izquierda Unida and Verdes Equo, on the one hand, and Podemos Alianza Verde, on the other, now represent. They all agree that in general, the weight of all that space will fall considerably from the six seats it won four years ago. A setback fueled by the split between Yolanda Díaz and Ione Belarra.

The state leaders of Sumar and Podemos have also had little involvement in the Basque campaign. Yolanda Díaz's coalition has avoided a landing of ministers as it did in the Galician elections and has limited the presence of state leaders to the second vice president and the Minister of Culture and spokesperson for Sumar, Ernest Urtasun.

As in the case of the PSOE, Sumar's campaign team designed a schedule with only two visits by Díaz to Euskadi. One at the beginning of the campaign and another for the central event. But at the last minute, the Minister of Labor decided to go for the third time to meet with the candidate, Alba García, with several Anbulantziak Borrokan unions. The Minister of Youth and Children, Sira Rego, also attended the campaign, along with the IU deputy Enrique Santiago, at an event in Eibar on the occasion of the anniversary of the Second Republic.

Podemos, for its part, has also left the leadership of the campaign to its candidates. Irene Montero opened with the head of the list, Miren Gorrotxategi, on April 4 in Bilbao, and then attended the party's general secretary, Ione Belarra, at the central event in Donosti, on April 13. Two days later, the leader of Podemos returned to Vitoria and stopped by once again for the closing of the campaign, on Friday in Bilbao. The former leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, also went to Bilbao last Friday to support the party's candidates.