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THE
“IBARRETXE PLAN”A NATIONALIST THREAT
AGAINST DEMOCRACY IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY
In September 2002, Juan José Ibarretxe, the lehendakari (premier)
of the Basque Government from the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party),
solemnly announced in the Basque Parliament that the following year
he intended to present a plan to establish a new political relationship
with Spain. Such approach would allow some progress in the solution
to the Basque conflict, a historical dispute that started –according
to the nationalists– with a violent suppression of Basque
rights by the French and the Spanish governments.
In July 2003, the Spanish press published a draft of the Ibarretxe
Plan, which looked very much like a Constitution of a sovereign
State; the lehendakari admitted its authenticity. Almost all non-nationalist
analysts who have studied the document consider it incompatible
with the Spanish Constitution and with the European Draft Constitution.
Should it finally be enacted, the Basque Country would stay out
of Spain and the European Union, since the Plan does not envisage
the possibility of a refusal: if it were not accepted, secession
would be taken for granted.
Therefore, the Ibarretxe Plan intends to impose the nationalist
program as a fait accompli, presenting as an invitation to “dialogue”
and “negotiation” a proposal that, due to its unilateral
nature, no State could accept without admitting a breakdown of its
Constitution. Since the majority of the Basque society does not
want independence, nor breaking-off with Spain or Europe, the nationalist
program to attain independence could only succeed by exploiting
to the maximum the disruptive effects of violence and terrorism,
and presenting the Ibarretxe Plan as the only way to peace. As a
matter of fact, making public statements against the goals of the
nationalists is enough to become automatically a target of ETA and
be marginalised from the institutions controlled by the nationalists.
Such blackmail turns per se this plan into a complete corruption
of democracy. Ibarretxe is not honest enough to call a spade a spade:
the political formula he proposes –the Euskadi Free Associated
Community– is a surreptitious declaration of independence,
with all the advantages of sovereignty and none of its inconveniences.
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