Bel Pozueta, mother of Adur Ramírez de Alda, convicted of hitting a civil guard in Alsasua, could not suppress a huge smile last Friday in Villava (Navarra). “We have achieved, after 40 years, the transfer of Traffic”, he congratulated himself to underline, then, that “this has hurt them”. Pozueta has practically assured her re-election as a representative for Navarra in Congress and what “has hurt” victims of terrorism, some political parties and the 150 civil guards of the Traffic Unit was that President Pedro Sánchez gave Bildu the goodbye of the Navarre roads from the agents of the Armed Institute.

The nationalist left closed yesterday in San Sebastián the most intense campaign in a general election. Without candidates with direct links to ETA on their lists, the coalition led by Arnaldo Otegi tries to extend its good results from 28-M -second force in votes after the PNV but first in councilors in the Basque Country- to 23-J. The two nationalist forces dispute in the Basque “national ballot boxes”, in the words of Otegi, the 18 deputies at stake in the Basque Country are practically tied, while in Navarra -where 5 congressmen are elected- only EH Bildu has the option of achieving a representative because Geroa Bai (a coalition in which the PNV is part) is very far from the PSOE of Navarra, UPN and even Javier García's PP.

In the Basque Country and Navarra several simultaneous games are played starting with the presidential duel between Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Pedro Sánchez. All the polls published before last Tuesday place the PNV, EH Bildu and the Basque PSOE tied at 5 seats. The Basque PP has secured the seat of Bea Fanjul for Vizcaya -which it already achieved in 2019- and will recover with Javier de Andrés the representative for Álava that it lost four years ago. Sumar, the political space that in 2016 came to win the general elections in the Basque Country, will be left with only one deputy although it is barely 400 votes away from taking away from the PSE-EE the Guipúzcoa seat that Pedro Sánchez tried to consolidate with his express trip last Tuesday to San Sebastián when he left the EU-Celac summit.

In the Basque Country, Sánchez would accumulate eleven supports and would have to convince Andoni Ortuzar again, his supporter in the motion of no confidence against Rajoy in 2018 and in the investiture in 2019. The Basque nationalists, however, have suffered a decrease in their ability to influence before EH Bildu and ERC and will raise their demands and “guarantees” if Sánchez needs them.

“We are not anyone's crutch”, Aitor Esteban, the person in charge of giving electoral air to a PNV that has not had time to digest the consolidation of EH Bildu as an alternative in the Basque Country with regional elections scheduled, has repeated in the campaign, if Urkullu does not precipitate his advance, in the spring of 2024.

In the regional community, UPN and PP settle their second electoral battle after the breakup of the Navarra Suma coalition. On 28-M, the regionalist formation achieved 92,392 votes compared to 24,019 for the PP, but Feijóo's party aspires to exceed 45,000 ballots to ensure a seat. The Socialists, who have paralyzed the formation of the Government of Navarra to avoid the photo with Bildu, would maintain their two seats.