Parliament on the Centre-Right, Government on the Left: Explaining Basque Exceptionalism

The Autonomous Elections of 2009 entailed a large change in Basque politics, given that the PNV, the party that had been governing the Basque institutions continuously since 1980, was removed from power by the PSE–EE.

However, the Basques did not vote very differently compared to other elections, the majority voting for nationalist parties, as it has been doing since 1980, and for centre-right parties, as it had done at the beginning of the autonomy and as of 2001. In this article, we aim to explain how, despite this clear tendency towards nationalism and the centre-right, a leftist and non-nationalist party is currently governing in the Basque Country.