Blind challenge against Bildu

Presented with a choice between declaring the entire slate of candidates put forward by Bildu- the latest demand on the part of the Popular Party (PP) in its kaleidoscopic and opportunistic antiterrorism policy- and questioning only the legality of the lists that contain incidences of "contamination" by remnants of the outlawed Batasuna grouping, the government appears to have opted for the former.

This option is one that is complicated to deal with judicially and the PP knows this as well as anybody, but the fact that the government has proposed it reduces further still its room for maneuver. That is precisely what the PP ultimately is seeking.

The Bildu coalition put forward 258 electoral lists of candidates to stand in the May 22 municipal and local elections in the Basque Country and Navarre containing members of legal parties- Eusko Alkartasuna (EA) and Alternatiba, a splinter party of the Basque branch of the United Left of Javier Madrazo- as well as people connected to Batasuna, but presented as independents. The fact of having belonged to an illegal political party does not preclude a candidacy attached to a legal one, as has been established by the Constitutional Court, except in the case that the latter is a continuation of an illegal party.

That is not the case with EA and Alternatiba, therefore, the evidence to challenge all of the coalition's lists cannot be based purely on the presence of former activists and sympathizers of Batasuna. The police reports presented to the courts do not contain such evidence, but that does not preclude the assertion that the political alliance responds to the designs of Batasuna in forming part of a meticulous "cleansing" of every indication of association with that outlawed party.

The contesting of Bildu's lists is based more on deduction, left to the criteria and work of the 61st chamber of the Supreme Court, than on verifiable evidence. It is a case of challenging blindly, with preventive intention, which is understandable in political terms but difficult to accommodate in a judicial proceeding.

It is true that a majority of the 61st chamber — nine magistrates to seven- applied in its recent decision to declare Sortu illegal an eminently preventive strategy based on ETA and Batasuna documents from 2008 and 2009 from which it was deduced that there had been no definitive schism between the abertzale radical Basque left and the terrorist organization.

But it is more problematic to apply this strategy in the case of electoral lists put forward by a coalition between legal political parties, and this will surely be reflected in the debate among the members of the Supreme Court.