Seven pairs for Bildu:

1. elections and voting. Now that the electoral campaign has begun, I have remembered what Savater said about the Basque Country in the years of ETA's lead: that elections were not held there, but rather voting, because the condition for the possibility of democratic elections is freedom. Just what was missing in Euskadi and what made the region an exceptional enclave in the European Union ―the true differential fact―. In that we have improved and, nevertheless, everything is so bitter: exercising passive suffrage cost the life or freedom of constitutionalists for decades; but it costs nothing to those who took them away.

2. memory and dementia. The Spanish left ―note that I have finally abandoned the adjectival apology of the phrase “certain left”: it is the only existing left― is obsessed with democratic memory, but it is a memory destroyed by madness and taken away from historical facts. Like patients with senile processes who evoke episodes of childhood over and over again, but are incapable of remembering what they did the day before, so our left has settled into a permanent invocation of the distant past ―the Republic, the Civil War, the Francoism― but he has forgotten what happened yesterday. And what was happening yesterday is that ETA murdered the compañeros of the PSOE and the compañeros of the PP and, in general, anyone who opposed their totalitarian project..

3. New York and Ermua. On the site of the Twin Towers, New York City has erected a 9/11 memorial to commemorate the attack and honor its heroes and victims. There is no one in the United States who does not know what happened there, even if they were not born in 2001.. And everyone born in that country will know about 9/11 from now on, because America is a self-respecting nation.. In Spain, on the other hand, the majority of young people do not know who Miguel Ángel Blanco was. Nor in the Basque Country. How is it possible that we have given up as a nation to remember the events and the victims of the bloodiest terrorist group in our history?

4. ethics and tactics. Asked about the presence of murderers and others convicted of terrorism on Bildu's lists, the socialist spokesman Patxi López, so passionate on other occasions, has coldly pronounced himself as a notarial act: “Bildu is a democratic party that chooses its lists according to the procedures of the law. And I have nothing more to say”. Actually, he did want to add something: he judged Bildu’s decision as “gasoline for the right”. That is to say, what the exlendakari reproaches the partner of the Government is not the moral indecency of filling its electoral lists with ETA members, but the inappropriateness of the matter: it is not an ethical question, but a tactical one.

5. Guilt and responsibility. There is a guilt that is criminally redeemable, but politically inextinguishable. The guilt of those who killed, the guilt of those who protected the violence and the guilt of those who today still celebrate and reward it, with tributes or with councilorships. The fault of ETA and the fault of Bildu. But there is also a much broader responsibility, one that concerns us all: to remember what happened, not to bless those who have ETA members on their lists and not to associate with them. Because not forgetting is the necessary condition for not repeating the past.. And because memory is the only space in which a country can honor those who died for democracy and freedom.

6. The victims and the executioners. We know that the preferences and attitudes of citizens are not immutable, and that they are influenced by the political offer. The opinions of the voters tend to reorient themselves when they do the speeches of their parties. It happened with the pardons for the prisoners of the procés: the supporters of the PSOE went from being offended because the possibility of pardon was mentioned to celebrating it – it was not going to happen in any way, but how appropriate it was -. The alignment is repeated with Bildu: the same ones who condemned the terror of ETA today prefer their embers to the right. ETA no longer exists, but we still have not resolved a key question: What kind of society do we want to live in? And another more lacerating: so many years of democratic struggle, to end up forgetting the victims and elevating the executioners?

7. PSOE and Collect. What a nefarious conjunction.