The president of the Government of Navarra, María Chivite (PSN), has called on “those of us who have institutional responsibilities” to first respect the “general interest” in their decisions. A message framed in the motion of censure in Pamplona that with the votes of four socialist councilors guaranteed the Mayor’s Office to Joseba Asiron (EH Bildu). In the last legislature, Chivite made the Otegi coalition its parliamentary partner and since last Thursday the Socialist Party of Navarra (PSN) has been the guarantor of Bildu in the capital of the regional community.
María Chivite has remained practically silent during the last two weeks in which the motion of censure has materialized in the Pamplona City Council. The general secretary of the PSN in her capacity as president of Navarra has appealed in her New Year’s Eve speech to the importance of “unity” in the face of “the noise that does not solve people’s problems.” Chivite has not made specific reference to either Bildu or UPN, although her words are framed in the aftermath of a traumatic replacement in the Pamplona Mayor’s Office after the PSN had committed to not making Joseba Asiron mayor.
The president of the regional community started her second term last August with the explicit support of EH Bildu, although the nationalist coalition is not part of a coalition executive with Geroa Bai and Contigo Navarra (coalition led by Podemos).
“The Government of Navarra belongs to everyone and is open to anyone who wants to contribute and participate,” said Chivite, who together with number 3 of the PSOE Santos Cerdán has led the strategy of removing UPN from the control of the Navarrese institutions in which the regionalists They governed without absolute majorities.
Chivite’s message was issued minutes after Lehendakari Urkullu’s last Christmas appearance. Lehendakari Iñigo Urkullu closes 2023 with a touch-up in his image but with the argument that he has championed since December 2012, when he started his decade at the head of the Basque Government. Urkullu, a politician who has pampered his institutional image, bases his last Christmas speech on “employment, coexistence, cohesion and self-government.” But, for the second time in his entire career, he slightly tweaks his look with a new goatee.
Urkullu closes 2023 convinced that “society has advanced and taken decisive steps towards the future.” A look that goes beyond the electoral calendar in which all the Basque parties have been moving for several months.
The Lehendakari has framed this last speech in a serene farewell in which classic references have slipped into Urkullu’s argument. “Serving Basque society is the greatest honor that he, personally, could never have imagined,” he stated in his speech in Basque and Spanish.
Iñigo Urkullu assumed the candidacy for lehendakari in 2012 when he was president of the PNV and after the turbulent period of Juan José Ibarretxe, promoter of a failed Basque statute known as the ‘plan’ that bears his name and which was endorsed by the nationalist left.
