Spain Tried to Outlaw Its Separatists: Now They Call the Shots
- Basque voters are poised to upturn the 40-year status quo
- Vote marks new chapter in fragmentation of political landscape
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After the Spanish state released the activists who’d been jailed for their connections to the Basque terrorist group ETA, most faded into the background. But not Arnaldo Otegi.
When he was let out in 2016 Otegi returned to take up a similar role in Basque politics to the one that led to his arrest. The country around him had changed over his six-year incarceration, even if he had not: his party had reinvented itself as a legitimate political player — the courts would anyway rule his conviction to be unjust — and the militant separatist movement out of which it grew had laid down arms.