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EXTRAORDINARY CALL
Pablo Iglesias is right: there is a nationalist left, alive, active and with power, that justifies the use of terrorist violence in order to achieve its goals.
The words of Inés Hernandon public television, in a highly rated program that has nothing to do with politics, have been inappropriate and therefore deserve more apologies and less nuance.
Clarifications are sometimes nothing more than confirmations. It must be made clear that the victim, in this case, is not her, but those murdered by ETA.
When Hernand says that “the word ETA is used lightly and that the Abertzale left was pacifist”, it is clear that he has more in mind Isabel Diaz Ayuso than to the victims of Basque terrorism. But he has made a big mistake.
The truth is that the nationalist left lived much better than the right and the constitutionalist left, and it was for something very simple. In the best of cases, because of his silence. And most frequently, for their collaboration.
Inés Hernand’s comment is very unfortunate. And although, as he clarified later, he “only” wanted to say that not all of the left was terrorists, which is obvious, what he did want to make clear is that the right is very happy to resurrect ETA and that terrorism is profitable for people like Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
As was also said of José María Aznar.
To clear up Inés Hernand’s confusion, it is best to go to someone like-minded.
I just saw this disgusting and miserable immorality. Inés Hernand, from “Presi, you are an icon”, telling the OT kids on television that we all pay that the “abertzale left was pacifist” and that what happened has been greatly distorted.
How disgusting, but what infinite disgust. pic.twitter.com/Ep5h0woVSb
— Miss Bennet (@Miss_Bennet5) December 7, 2025
The words of the political scientist Pablo Iglesias Anyone can understand them:
“The Constitution that is produced in this country does not establish a kind of democratic rules of the game, but rather maintains a series of powers, in a very ‘Lampedusian’ way (changing everything so that everything remains the same), which allowed the permanence of a series of economic and also political elites in the main mechanisms and devices of power of the Spanish State. I like to tell this here because the one who realized this from the beginning was the Basque left and ETA. No matter how much democratic procedure there is, there are certain rights that cannot be exercise within the framework of Spanish law”.
What Pablo Iglesias is saying, who is a member of another left that was not nationalist either, and that has formed and is part of a democratic government, is that, against a Transition that did not change anything about Franco’s regime, there was a Basque left and a terrorist group that did more than all the others to defend rights that could not be exercised before.
According to him, ETA has done more for democracy than all the protagonists of the Transition combined.
On one side, Iglesias places the defenders of democracy, and on the other the continuers of the dictatorship. On one side is freedom, on the other there is nothing.
Terrorist violence is justified if it is for that freedom. I mean, that ETA’s terrorism is justified against the constitutionalists.
The professor, former minister and political scientist says it in a talk in a herriko tavern on the nationalist left.
And he says it because it’s true. The nationalist left continues to think like this. Pablo Iglesias is absolutely right, and Inés Hernand, in this case, is absolutely wrong.
There is a left that justifies any type of violence in order to achieve certain rights.
It is not that the right is determined not to forget ETA. The thing is that there is a guiding line in the story that is wanted to be made with Franco, the Transition and ETA that it is fair to refute. A thread of memory on which depends a story that places an immense majority of Spaniards on an anti-democratic front, and the rest as liberators legitimized to do anything for “freedom”.
To build democracy, half of Spaniards cannot be left out again. And violence, whatever its form, must be forcefully rejected.
Pablo Iglesias could not have said it more clearly: there is a nationalist left, alive, active and with power, that justifies the use of terrorist violence in order to achieve its goals.
In this, Ayuso and Iglesias agree, and disagree with Inés Hernand.