The PNV believes that Bildu will grow at the expense of Podemos and without threatening its dominance in the Basque Country
Of the many political battles that take place simultaneously on March 28, one of the most important for national politics is that of the Basque Country.. There are no regional elections in Euskadi, but there are municipal ones and the three General Meetings, which are used to measure whether the PNV maintains political hegemony in the community or if, on the contrary, attempts to strengthen EH Bildu until it becomes the partner preference of the left in Madrid.
PNV sources explain that these elections were so favorable for the jeltzales in 2019 that it is almost impossible to repeat those results. However, according to his forecasts, the party of Andoni Ortuzar and lehendakari Iñigo Urkullu plans to maintain its political hegemony in the Basque Country and, above all, in the nationalist and sovereignist spectrum.
They agree with the leadership of the PSOE in maintaining that if Bildu ever intends to replace the PNV in those institutions and as the preferred parliamentary interlocutor, that option is still a long way off.. At some point, Podemos sought to have Bildu replace the PNV in the same way that ERC replaced in Catalonia what was Convergència in Congress with governments of PP and PSOE.
[Sánchez bothers the PNV with the agreement on the Housing Law and the leadership of Bildu]
According to their data, Bildu will surely rise compared to 2019, but they consider that it will be, above all, at the expense of United We Can, in a clear decline in recent years and sharing part of the same electorate.
For the first time in constitutional history, the PNV has the Presidency of the community, the mayoralty of the three Basque capitals and the three provincial councils. In other words, practically all the institutional power of the Basque Country.
According to the calculations of the nationalists, in Vizcaya they maintain an advantage that almost doubles the results of Bildu. In Álava their expectation is also very positive and they only admit that there may be a “battle” in Guipúzcoa. In fact, Bildu already won in 2011 in Guipúzcoa.
His forecast is that it will be very difficult for them to maintain the result of 2019 and that Bildu will grow, but as a consequence of the fall of Podemos, not because the agreements in Congress with the Government of Pedro Sánchez are profitable.. Podemos became the party with the most votes in the Basque Country in a general election in 2017, but since then it has not stopped falling.
PNV sources assure that Bildu's role in Congress is overvalued “in Madrid on the right” to wear down Sánchez, but that this position does not exist in Basque politics. They explain that the PNV does not see its centrality endangered, which, for example, has led it to agree with all the presidents of the PP and PSOE Government and to always govern the Basque Country, with the parenthesis of the Presidency of Patxi López.
The PNV, through Urkullu and his parliamentary spokesman, Aitor Esteban, has been very critical of Bildu for the inclusion on his lists of more than 40 convicted of terrorism (seven of them for blood crimes).. It has even been more critical than the PSOE itself.
However, the PNV understands that this avoidable event has more incidence outside the Basque Country, precisely, to fuel the fire against the Sánchez government and they attribute it to the maintenance of the old guard of Sortu, the parent party of Bildu.