ETA's success: elections without freedom and more than 180,000 Basques in exile

@ElentirENG ES 4·21·2024 · 9:10 0

This Sunday elections are held in the Basque autonomous community. Elections that continue to be marked by ETA terrorism.

PP vs Vox: four clues to know who is serious in Spain about the fight against separatism
The son of a socialist murdered by ETA accuses Sánchez of making agreements with criminals

Although this terrorist group no longer kills, its sympathizers continue to impose the law of fear in the Basque provinces through threats and violence, as has been seen in this electoral campaign, in which a Once again we have been able to contemplate acts of harassment against Vox that have not been condemned by any of the other parties. These acts of harassment make clear the extent to which the situation in that Spanish region is very far from being that of a democracy. Separatism has degraded freedoms in that region with practices typical of the Sicilian mafia.

To this abnormality we must add systematic fraud that has occurred in all Basque elections for decades. A fraud that is added to the law of fear that reaches the polling stations of many small towns dominated by ETA sympathizers. This fraud consists of the expulsion from their land, and therefore from the regional electoral roll, of more than 180,000 Basques, according to data published in a CEU-CEFAS report. That is the number of Basques who had to leave their land due to the terror of ETA and the lack of freedom imposed by separatism between 1977 and 2022.

It is not a definitive figure. To those 180,000 Basques exiled due to separatism we would have to add tens of thousands of descendants, who under normal conditions would have continued living and could continue voting in their parents' homeland if they had not been kicked out of it. The CEU-CEFAS report estimates that those 180,000 exiles alone represent 9% of the Basque population in 1977.

Although ETA has stopped killing, this terrorist group has obtained the great success of shaping to its liking an electoral roll from which it has expelled almost a tenth of the population through murders, kidnappings , extortion and threats. In November 2023, Vox presented an initiative in the Basque Parliament to facilitate the return of these exiles, demanding a study to identify the people who fled, know their situation and offer help so that they return to their homeland. Only Vox, the Popular Party and Ciudadanos supported that initiative.

As in Catalonia, the PSOE and the ultra-leftists of Elkarrekin Podemos-IU voted against along with the separatists of the PNV and Bildu. As has been happening for years, socialists and communists have created a common front with separatism to shield an electoral fraud achieved through the expulsion of many right-wing people from their land, an expulsion obtained through violence. Sadly, in this electoral campaign the Popular Party has offered to reach an agreement with the PNV and the PSOE, that is, with the same ones who oppose repairing the antidemocratic abnormality perpetrated by ETA.

Let us remember that between 2012 and 2023, the PP and the PSOE opposed three petitions to outlaw Bildu (one presented by UPyD and two presented by Vox). In case anyone hasn't heard yet, Bildu is a party that has never condemned ETA's terrorism or any of its 853 murders, including those of 22 children and babies.

Benefiting from this, now the heirs of ETA have the opportunity to govern a region from which they expelled 180,000 Basques. I hope that today no one commits the infamy of referring to these elections as "the festival of democracy", as many media do with other electoral calls. What separatism has done in the Basque provinces is bury democracy, and not organize a party for it. As long as that region remains controlled by those who use mafia practices to impose their will, it will not be possible to say that there is democratic normality or clean elections.