Moderate nationalists won a crucial election in Spain's Basque region yesterday as political allies of the separatist group ETA were punished at the polls by voters recoiling from its renewed campaign of violence.
A coalition led by the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) - which favours moves toward independence by peaceful means - increased its strength in the 75-seat regional parliament to 33 seats from 27.
The nationalists - who have ruled the region uninterrupted for the past two decades - failed again to muster a 38-seat majority and will face an uphill struggle to negotiate enough backing from other parties to form a new government.
The biggest loser in yesterday's election was Euskal Herritarrok (EH), a radical leftwing party widely considered to be ETA's political wing and branded by the Spanish government as "accomplices to terrorism".
EH lost half of the 14 seats it won in the 1998 regional election during an ETA ceasefire and saw its percentage of the popular vote plunge to nearly 10 per cent, the lowest since Spain's return to democracy in the late 1970s.
In spite of the fact that early results had predicted that PNV would be closely followed by the Madrid-based Popular Party, the PP only won three more than the 16 seats than they held in the previous parliament.
Elections in the Basque Country passed off with only minor incidents marring an otherwise peaceful day when gangs of pro-independence demonstrators tried to prevent nonnationalist politicians casting their votes and protesting illegalisation last week of Haika, the ETA youth wing.
The turnout of more than 78 per cent was over 7 per cent greater than in the last regional elections in 1998 and higher than in any other Basque elections. All parties welcomed this high turnout.
Groups of radical youths staged similar disturbances as other non-nationalist politicians cast their votes. The Popular Party president, Mr Carlos Iturgaiz, was jostled by pro-ETA demonstrators who tried to prevent him voting with his wife. Mr Iturgaiz, like hundreds of Basque politicians, journalists and other Basques, was accompanied by his bodyguards.
The 1.8 million Basques went to the polls to elect their seventh parliament since they approved an autonomy stature in 1980. Sixty-five thousand were voters who had reached the age of 18 since the last elections in 1998 and were voting for the first time.
The number of people applying for a postal vote was three times higher than had been registered in any previous election, a sign of the fear felt by many Basques who are afraid to vote in person.
The campaign has been bitterly fought, with no party showing a clear lead and only one issue: how to bring an end to ETA's terrorist threat, which has cost 30 lives since the ending of a 14-month ceasefire in January of last year.
It was marred by the murder of Manuel Gimenez, the Popular Party president in the Aragons region, last Sunday as he walked to a football match with his teenage son.
On Friday night, as campaigning ended at midnight, a 20kg car-bomb exploded in a crowded Madrid street. Almost miraculously no one was killed and only one person was seriously injured. The entire frontage of the eight-storey BBVA building in Calle Goya was blown out. The night watchman was buried under the wreckage and received serious cuts to his face.