Has the spectre of terrorism finally been excised from Spain?

Good news comes from the success of a terrorist-linked political party

Sometimes good things come in strange packages. On April 21st Spain’s Basque Country voted in regional elections. The Basque Nationalist Party (pnv), the conservative separatist movement that has led the region since 2012, scraped out the barest of wins, tying its rival in the number of seats and eking out a symbolic victory in the number of votes cast. But that rival was eh Bildu, which had its best result ever. The left-wing separatist party is the descendant of the political wing of eta, a terrorist group that killed hundreds of people across four decades in Spain.

eta formally ended its “armed struggle” in 2011. Bildu has never apologised for eta’s terrorism, saying in 2021 only that it felt the pain of its victims and that its violence “never should have happened”. Now it is the region’s second political force, and many Spaniards are horrified.