“We have stopped to the right,” said emphatically the president of a nationalist party that carries obedience to God and the laws of the Middle Ages engraved in all its symbols. The polygraph of history would blow up when hearing it, but that is what the president of the PNV, Andoni Ortuzar, said, to emphasize that his party, the Basque deputies of this party, did not intend to support the Popular Party to form a government, although have won the elections. “We have stopped on the right,” said the good man. But, let's see, since when has the PNV been a leftist party?

Enough of the ideological paste of the most radical left that, trampling on its first ideal, internationalism, has converted in Spain to pro-independence nationalism. They are united by the desire to destroy the Constitution, that is understood. But, from there to the maximum delusion of considering that the defense of medieval privileges is a sign of identity of the left, there is a stretch impossible to fill with justifications. Let's see what's on the left in the curriculum of those nationalisms… Let's do a brief review. Basque and Catalan nationalisms are inventions of the bourgeoisie of both regions, which arose after the loss of the last colonies, at the end of the 19th century.. Spain, as a reference and as a State, ceases to interest them as soon as the businesses of those wealthy classes begin to be affected by the decline that entails the complete collapse of the Empire born after the discovery of America.

In other words, everything was going well while Spanishness served them to trade, whether it was fabrics or black slaves, and there is the figure engraved in stone of a black slave on the Gothic façade of the Palau de la Generalitat. It is when the Spanish business collapses that the discomforts with the State begin and the application, through nationalism, of a strategy that, since the Carlist wars, has been highly profitable for those territories: exchanging disaffection with Spain for privileges and state investments. With these wickerwork, the sustained lie of the existence of a Basque nation and a Catalan nation is built, something that has never happened in history; that is why in the coat of arms of Spain are Navarra and Aragon, as well as Castilla, León and Granada.

Sabio Arana, for example, who is considered the father of Basque nationalism, was educated in France, in Bayonne, which is where his family, defenders of Carlism, had to flee.. The ideology that he conceived for the Basque Country was in tune with some of the movements of the time, at the end of the 19th century; a traditionalist, xenophobic and reactionary nationalism. In the medieval fueros he found the Rosetta stone of the Basque people and in religious fundamentalism, the leadership model. How many atrocities have not been committed in this world in the name of God? Well, this one about Sabino Arana and Basque nationalism is one more. Just one sentence: “Ethnographically, there is a difference between being Spanish and being Basque, the Basque race is substantially different from the Spanish race. A large number of Spaniards seem to be irrefutable testimony to Darwin's theory, since more than men they resemble apes, little less beasts than the gorilla: do not seek in their faces the expression of human intelligence or any virtue; his gaze only reveals idiocy and brutality”.

The only similarities in such a discourse can be found in Franco's invocations of the Spanish race, who even wrote the script for a film with that title, and in those of Catalan nationalism, also defenders of the excellence of the “genetic distribution of the Catalan population, determined among other characteristics by intelligence”, as said by Heribert Barrera, one of the exiles of Esquerra Republicana who returned with democracy and was the first president of the Catalan Parliament. Part of the answer was given before, because that strategy of exchanging hatred of Spain for privileges continues to work and, since the electoral system benefits them as pivotal parties, they just have to continue exploiting it. What must be recognized, in any case, is the ability to adapt, the constant cross-dressing, to keep turning the discourse in the direction that the electoral winds blow.

Thus, the Basque Nationalist Party preserves intact the mottos of its origins, those of its founding father, Sabino Arana, but it has changed its discourse to the left, to enter, first, the spaces of the Socialist Party of Euskadi, and, now, to prevent Bildu from continuing to grow and definitively take away their hegemony in the Basque Country.

The motto remains the same, 'God and the old law' (Jaungoikoa eta lege zaharra, in Basque), and the ikurriña waves with its two superimposed crosses, the white cross of Jesus Christ and the green cross of Saint Andrew, but the speech is now enrolled in Social Christianity. The journalist Pedro Ontoso, in an article in El Correo, further details the ideological affiliation of the PNV with the words of Ortuzar himself: “A movement that, for the most part, is located in the spectrum of the center-left, in progressive social Christianity”. But without renouncing what Sabino Arana wrote as signs of identity: “The motto ('God and the old law'), the coat of arms and the flag of Bizkaia mean the same thing, namely: the eternal rights of God and the national rights of Bizkaia”. Whoever wants to, find explanations and be encouraged to say what the ideology of the PNV really is, because there should be no similar evolution in the world. But this is how the story is told, the pathetic background of the nationalisms that defend privileges, the left, social democracy, inequality, progressivism and fueros. And two hard-boiled eggs, if necessary, as that one would say.