Poll boost for Basque nationalists

Basque Nationalist Party supporters celebrate

BILBAO, Spain (CNN) -- The ruling Basque Nationalist Party has won the most parliamentary seats in Basque regional elections.

With nearly all the votes counted, official figures show the party won 33 seats in the 75-member parliament.

The Basque Nationalists (PNV), which won 27 seats in the last election in 1998, wants independence from Spain through peaceful means.

The election outcome is a blow to Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a fierce opponent of Basque self-determination who had made ousting the nationalists one of his government's top priorities.

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His ruling centre-right Popular Party (PP) maintained its position as the Basque region's second largest political force due to its coalition with a smaller conservative party, but only managed to gain a single seat for a combined 19 seats.

Popular Party candidate for regional president, Jaime Mayor Oreja, said the vote was a disappointment.

But he said he was pleased votes for his party had cut those for Euskal Herritarrok (EH), a radical leftist party widely considered the political wing of separatist group ETA.

The Socialist Party won 14 seats.

Analysts said the Basque Nationalists, who have governed for 21 years, could link with the communist-led United Left Party, which has three parliamentary seats.

Voter participation in the weekend's poll was a record 79 percent.

All five competing parties said the election was critical to the future of the Basque region.

The campaign was marked by the shooting of a conservative Popular Party senator a week before and a car bombing on Friday in Madrid that wounded 14 people.

Both attacks were blamed on ETA, which in its 33-year independence campaign has been blamed for 800 killings.

The biggest loser in the elections was Euskal Herritarrok (EH), which lost half the 14 seats it won in a 1998 regional election during an ETA ceasefire and saw its percentage of the popular vote plunge to about 10 percent, the lowest since Spain's return to democracy in the late 1970s.

"The key event of this day has been without doubt that the citizens...have voted against terror. They have punished terrorism at the polls," said Javier Arenas, secretary-general of the PP.

EH leader Arnaldo Otegi, who has refused to condemn ETA bombings and assassinations, blamed his party's losses on a "fear campaign" waged by non-nationalists.

Incumbent Basque president Juan Jose Ibarrexte told cheering supporters in Vitoria, seat of the region's autonomous government, that the result was a victory for his party's push for multi-party dialogue to end the separatist conflict.

The PNV formed a government after the 1998 election by gaining the support of EH, with whom it had worked to secure ETA's first ceasefire in nearly a decade.

But the alliance broke down when ETA resumed its attacks, and Ibarrexte has vowed this time to make no deals with EH.

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Basque Nationalist Party
Humanist Party of the Basque Country
Popular Party
Socialist Party

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