Candidates with terrorist past bring Eta into Spanish campaign

A Basque nationalist party’s inclusion of dozens of candidates convicted of terrorist offences in its electoral lists has put the legacy of the separatist group Eta under scrutiny in advance of Spain’s local elections.

EH Bildu, a left-wing pro-independence party, has 44 candidates who have been found guilty of terror-related crimes on its lists for regional and municipal elections in the Basque Country and neighbouring Navarre on May 28th. Seven of them were convicted of murder.

Eta killed 853 people during its campaign for an independent Basque Country. It formally ended its use of violence in 2011 before disbanding in 2018. Until then, EH Bildu was seen as the organisation’s political voice.

Consuelo Ordonez, president of the Covite terrorism victims’ organisation, said the inclusion of the convicted candidates showed that politics had become “the revolving doors for terrorists”.

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She added: “The fact that these people can fill public posts, as if they had not posed a serious threat to democracy in the past, is worrying and disappointing.”

Among those on the lists is Agustin Muinos Diaz, who received a 29-year jail sentence for the 1983 murder of a businessman and who is a candidate in the town of Legutiano. Asier Uribarri Benito, who was given a 16-year sentence for the killing of a civil guard in 1997, is a candidate in the town of Maruri-Jetabe.

Although it no longer exists, Eta has remained an issue for the unionist right. EH Bildu has fielded candidates with terror-related convictions in the past, but the fact the party’s five members of Congress have provided parliamentary support to the coalition government of socialist Pedro Sanchez has made this campaign particularly contentious.

The leader of the conservative Popular Party (PP), Alberto Nunez Feijoo, warned that the government should “not rely on a party like EH Bildu after seeing members of a terrorist group and people convicted of murder on its lists”.

“Just imagine an electoral list full of supremacists who were murderers and 20 years later they are in a party,” said Maite Pagazaurtundúa, an MEP for the centre-right Ciudadanos and whose brother Joseba was killed by Eta.

Some close to the government have also admitted unease at EH Bildu’s candidates. Patxi López, spokesman for Sánchez’s socialists, when asked about the inclusion of the convicted candidates, said he didn’t “like it at all”.

Sánchez’s parliamentary reliance on EH Bildu and Catalan nationalists has been a source of outrage for the opposition throughout his tenure. Although local matters will be more dominant in the elections, which will be held in all town halls and most regions in Spain, the Eta debate has distracted attention from a series of socialist policy announcements.

Sánchez himself has not directly addressed the matter, although he has pointed to the tendency of many on the right and far right to exploit the Eta issue for electoral benefit. “I will never use the drama of terrorism to divide society, or to pit people against each other, I won’t do that now – others have done,” he said.

While EH Bildu itself has avoided commenting, some on the left have justified the candidates’ inclusion, underlining the fact that they have all served their sentences and that they belong to a lawful party. “What you cannot dispute is that Eta hasn’t [been active] for more than a decade,” said Gabriel Rufián, a member of parliament for the Catalan Republican Left (ERC).

“Whether you like it or not, the Basque pro-independence left is very important in the Basque Country and it does politics.”

Gorka Landaburu, a Basque journalist and commentator who survived an Eta attack but who has been supportive of EH Bildu’s involvement in the political arena, said the party needed to be more critical of its own past. The inclusion of the convicted candidates, he said, was “legal, but it isn’t moral or ethical. This is not the way to move towards coexistence or respecting memory.”