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Posted Sunday, Feb. 29, 2004; 15.48GMT
But the Basque and Catalan governments want more, and the PP — and many other Spaniards resentful of claims of special status by two of the country’s richest regions — isn’t willing to give it to them. The Basque government drew its line in the sand last October, when the President of the autonomous government, Juan José Ibarretxe, presented his proposal to make the Basque Country a “freely associated state” with Spain, having a separate court system and separate representation in the E.U. Ibarretxe says he will hold a referendum to see what Basques think of his plan, which he says is not a bid for independence — although nearly all other parties claim it is the thin end of that wedge. The “Ibarretxe Plan” was attacked by both the Socialist opposition and the government. Zapatero has called for Ibarretxe to withdraw his plan, warning, “Not to do so will only contribute to the further divisions within the Basque Country.” Rajoy said it “assumes the same objectives as ETA,” namely, separation from Spain, and the PP girded for battle. In November it pushed through a law, aimed squarely at Ibarretxe, that sets a prison term of three to five years for calling a referendum without authorization from the Spanish parliament.
Since the Ibarretxe Plan is only a proposal that hasn’t been put to a parliamentary vote, many legal analysts contend that the Aznar government went too far by invoking the Constitutional Court against a political debate rather than a concrete law. The government, whose internal polling has indicated that terrorism is the No. 1 public concern, figured — correctly, it appears — that a hard line would go down well with most Spaniards. For Arístegui, the Ibarretxe Plan is evidence of “the mortgage [Ibarretxe’s] Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) has to pay to ETA: if they don’t keep pushing for separatism, the terrorists will either kill them or make public their relation with the party.”
The Basque government says it opposes ETA at every turn, and claims Arístegui’s reading is deliberately overwrought and meant to provoke fear rather than discussion. “Terrorism has become an excuse to negate political dialogue,” says Idoia Zenarruzabeitia, Vice President of the Basque government. “The PP government is using this [plan] as an excuse to reduce the scope of our democracy and drastically restrict civil liberties.” She argues that the Ibarretxe Plan merely pushes for rights implicitly promised to the Basque Country in the constitution but never realized. “The Spanish state has a tendency to absorb everything to the center,” she says. “It doesn’t admit that the agreement reached 25 years ago was to establish a truly decentralized state.”
That position is questionable: there has clearly been more dispersal than absorption of power in that time. But Catalonia, too, has been making similar arguments since November, when Maragall’s Socialists launched a coalition government with the Republican Left and a small green-left party. “We have a 25-year-old constitution that has gone as far as it can go as it is,” says Maragall. “This constitution served to create Spain as it is now, but it is not fit to move us forward.” He says that it was only “with gritted teeth” that the most conservative parts of Spanish society — including Aznar himself — accepted the constitution in the first place. “Now that they’ve come to power,” he argues, “they have decided to freeze this living legal body in time.”
The election has heated the debate over Spain’s constitution to a critical point. ETA’s intervention in the campaign and the ensuing backlash are sobering reminders that fear still looms too large over Spanish politics. Those difficulties only drive home what a devilishly complex equation the Spanish constitution has to resolve. Its innovative arrangement of asymmetric power centers has kept Spain ticking forward in the wake of a bloody and repressive mid-20th century. But for the center to hold, Spain may have to keep innovating in constitutional matters as it has in other fields. The regions won’t allow it the option of standing still.
With reporting by Rod Usher and Jane
Walker/Madrid and Enrique Zaldua/Barcelona
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