Outcome of elections “could see Spain resemble pre-Hitler Germany”

The regional premier of Navarre, Yolanda Barcina, said on Wednesday that the outcome of Sunday’s municipal and regional elections in Spain could derive into a situation similar to pre-Hitler Germany, today’s Venezuela or Argentina under Perón.

In a television interview on the morning show ‘Los Desayunos de TVE,’ Barcina – who is also the leader of Union of the Navarrese People (UPN), a center-right regionalist party with working ties to the Popular Party (PP) – underscored that Barcelona could soon have a mayor “who defends the occupation of private property,” a reference to social activist Ada Colau.

Pamplona runs the risk of having a mayor who hasn’t even condemned the assassination of councilors who used to sit inside that very same council”

Yolanda Barcina, Navarre regional premier

The head of UPN, which has been ruling the Navarre region uninterruptedly since 1996 and the city of Pamplona since 1999, added that “naturally, voters are always right, but we could end up with what happened in Argentina under Perón or what’s happened in Venezuela. This is a change that we as voters will have to reflect upon, to see where we are headed.”

Barcina recommended reading Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, a famous account of the end of the Austrian-Hungarian empire in the early 20th century.

“Things can change like they changed in Germany before the two world wars, they can change like they changed in Venezuela or Argentina.”

In this scenario of left-wing alliances, she added, the Navarrese capital could end up with a mayor from Euskal Herria Bildu (EH Bildu), a bloc of radical Basque parties with historical ties to the terrorist group ETA, although it only won five seats out of the 27 in the local council.

“Pamplona runs the risk of having a mayor who hasn’t even condemned the assassination of councilors who used to sit inside that very same council,” she said, asking Podemos and the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) to have a good think before supporting EH Bildu. Radical left-wing Basque nationalists, known collectively as the “abertzale,” have traditionally supported annexing Navarre as part of the Greater Basque Country.