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Basque parliament elects non-nationalist head
AFP - Wednesday, May 6
VITORIA, Spain (AFP) - - The regional parliament in Spain's troubled Basque Country on Tuesday turned the page on nearly 30 years of rule by nationalists with the election of a socialist head of government.
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As expected the 13 lawmakers from the conservative Popular Party and the sole representative from the UPyD party voted for Lopez, whose socialists captured 25 seats in regional elections held on March 1, giving him the support of the majority of the 75 lawmakers in the chamber.
The Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which had ruled the wealthy northern region bordering France since it got its own regional assembly in 1980, captured 30 seats in the election, the most of any single party but less than the three non-nationalist parties combined.
In his address to the chamber before the vote Lopez, 49, said the "priority task" of his government would be the fight against ETA which has killed 825 people in Spain its 40-year campaign of bombings and shootings for an independent Basque homeland.
"We are closer to the end of ETA but we have not arrived at that point yet," he said in a reference to a recent wave of arrests of members of the outfit in Spain as well as across the border in France.
Lopez will head a minority government without forming an official coalition with the PP, which on the national level has been fiercely critical of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, also a socialist.
His government plans to abolish subsidies for associations representing imprisoned ETA members, ban public tributes to members of the outfit and provide Basque police with more means to fight the group.
It also intends to halt a programme aimed at making Basque the main language in school, with children given the option to study mainly in Spanish if their families want them to.
Weather maps on Basque public television will no longer show "the Greater Basque Country", embracing both the Spanish and France Basque countries and the Spanish province of Navarra, but only Euskadi, the Spanish Basque Country.
"All the measures which the Basque government adopted, openly or implicitly, in defence of the Basque identity will end," radio Cadena Ser commentator and essayist Jose Maria Ridao told AFP ahead of the vote.
Lopez also vowed to end the politics of "confrontation" of his predecessor, Juan Jose Ibarretxe of the PNV who had been battling with the central government to hold a referendum among Basques on the region's links with the rest of Spain.
"I am not going to govern just for some but for all," he said.
Ibarretxe announced just before the assembly voted that he was retiring from politics.
"What will change, aside from the policies that the government of Patxi Lopez will adopt, is the idea that power in the Basque Country is the exclusive inheritance of the PNV," Florencio Dominguez, a journalist and author of several books on Basque issues, told AFP before the vote.
ETA, which is considered a terrorist organisation by both the European Union and the United States, warned in its latest statement that Lopez's government would be its "priority target".
At the end of April Spanish police said they had detained ETA's suspected military operations chief, Jurdan Martitegi, who they said was preparing a bomb attack at the investiture of the next Basque regional government.
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Enlarge Photo
Leader of the Basque Socialist Party PSE-PSOE Patxi Lopez (R) arrives at the Basque regional Parliament with his wife Begona Gil. The regional parliament in Spain's troubled Basque Country on Tuesday turned the page on nearly 30 years of rule by nationalists with the election of a socialist head of government.
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