The PNV surprises with manager Imanol Pradales as Urkullu's replacement for the 2024 elections
The PNV leadership has proposed Imanol Pradales as a candidate for lehendakari in the regional elections to be held next year. He will be the replacement for Iñigo Urkullu, whom the nationalist leadership “thanks and recognizes” for the work carried out in the three terms he spent at the head of the Basque Government.
Pradales, 47 years old, who is currently a provincial deputy for Infrastructure, thus becomes Andoni Ortuzar's proposal to head the Peneuvista list and try to stop Bildu's electoral pull.
The decision was adopted this morning, in an extraordinary meeting of the Euzkadi Buru Batzar, which was originally going to be held on Monday. However, this has been brought forward after it was leaked yesterday that Urkullu was removed from a feasible fourth term, a fact that visualizes the cracks in a PNV threatened at the polls by the electoral growth of EH Bildu. With Urkullu's farewell, a golden decade closes for Basque nationalism, which from 2012 to 2023 has governed the Basque institutions together with the Basque PSOE.
Imanol Pradales, affiliated with the Santurtzi organization (Vizcaya), has a doctorate in Sociology and Political Sciences from the University of Deusto, speaks several languages and has completed various master's degrees.. Between July 2011 and June 2015 he was Deputy for Economic Promotion in the Provincial Council of Vizcaya and from July 2015 to the present he has been the Deputy for Infrastructure and Territorial Development in the same organization, reports Efe.
Urkullu's institutional weight
The replacement of Urkullu, unexpected and inopportune, exposes Sabin Etxea's apparatus and aborts the strategy used by the Lehendakari since last September to underline his institutional weight. The decision adopted by the PNV last Thursday was reported yesterday at noon by El Correo. The news shattered the agenda of the PNV, which had arranged with a delegation from Junts the first public meeting in Bilbao with Andoni Ortuzar and Jordi Turull presiding over it.
The PNV not only took a while to react but, in the face of media pressure, issued a statement in which it neither denied nor confirmed the replacement of Urkullu, the maximum political capital of the Basque nationalists until yesterday.. “The Euzkadi Buru Batzar has not yet started the process to configure the candidates with which EAJ-PNV will compete in the next Basque elections,” nationalist sources indicated.. A day later, the PNV leadership proposed Imanol Pradales as its candidate for lehendakari, despite the fact that his name did not appear in the initial pools.
His “proven management capacity” and “his contribution to all the processes of reflection and innovation that the PNV has developed in the last ten years make him a deep connoisseur of our internal and external political reality,” Ortuzar said in a video, after the party meeting, to defend the election of its candidate for the next appointment with the polls.