Bildu legal at last

Published on 6 May 2011 at 10:18

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Change of programme for municipal elections in Spain on May 22: “Bildu will stand for election,” announces El Correo. On May 5, the Spanish Constitutional Court validated, by six votes to five, the 254 candidates of the coalition of two nationalist parties and members of the Basque separatist left. This decision supersedes the May 1 decision of the Supreme Court prohibiting these candidates because of their links to Batasuna, the political party linked to the ETA terrorist group, banned in 2003. The Constitutional Court has opted for a “democracy without exclusions,”says the Basque daily in an editorial, adding that the evidence advanced by the Judge Advocate General was not sufficiently persuasive “to restrict the right to political participation” and that that right “outweighs the suspicion that clings to Bildu.” El Correo emphasises nevertheless that “the democratic integration of the pro-independence left has become a thorny matter for the courts,” and that acceptance of this decision by Spanish society will allow the pro-independence left to demonstrate “the stability of the democratic system and of a society that does not tolerate fundamentalists who make a mockery of freedom.”

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