In an election campaign, the parties are said to seek to identify issues of public interest on which to make attractive proposals. For this reason, it is often desired to avoid abstention, since abstention would indicate the disinterest of the population. The theory requires practice, however, and the practice says that the parties themselves influence the determination of the interest of the citizens, mainly through the media, and more specifically through the treatment given to the new ones that are disseminated through the media.

However, practice now tells us that the State prefers certain citizens to resort to abstention rather than to involve them in the institutionalized political dynamics of society. I haven’t seen them yet, but institutional messages will soon begin encouraging people to vote. In such cases, people are asked to act responsibly; to fulfil their responsibilities as citizens. There are those who consider it compulsory for the people to vote, and those who condemn abstention. In the South Basque Country, on the other hand, there is a strong determination to exclude a significant number of citizens from the electoral game. Solid is another sign of Spain’s democratic tradition!

But it’s not the only gesture. In fact, this tradition does not allow to cultivate the independence that is the interest of many Basque citizens (although it can be claimed). To defend such a decision, there are many well-founded reasons: solidarity, avoidance of possible friction between citizens, etc. In addition, there are those who claim that, outside the national problem, there are thousands of issues of interest, and even those who consider other issues to be of real interest, unlike the national problem.

But going back to the beginning: what is the interest of citizens; who decides what it is; or how it is influenced to move one or the other. Without needing any special information, I would make a clear statement: In the Southern Basque Country, the national issue is of interest, and I could also say that it is of the greatest interest. These elections may have been aimed at responding to this great interest, but we know in advance that they are not. On the contrary, it is this issue that we do not want to respond to, and this is something that the political forces that present themselves are aware of. They know that the national question, which is of great interest to the citizens of the Southern Basque Country, requires a solution among all the political actors, and that leaving one of these forces on the sidelines of the elections, it is impossible to achieve a solution. Whose interest do they want to defend, then?