Rodolfo Ares, historian of Basque socialism, dies

The PSE has lost one of the most important figures in Basque politics in the last 30 years: Rodolfo Ares.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
30 January 2023 Monday 06:19
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Rodolfo Ares, historian of Basque socialism, dies

The PSE has lost one of the most important figures in Basque politics in the last 30 years: Rodolfo Ares. The party itself has announced this morning the death of someone who was a very prominent leader of the formation with the general secretaries Ramón Jáuregui, Nicolás Redondo Terreros and Patxi López. A party man who remained in the leadership of the Basque socialists during two key decades of Basque politics.

Rodolfo Ares, who has died at the age of 68, would become number two in the PSE, Socialist spokesman in the Basque Parliament and Interior Minister of the Basque Government, with Patxi López as Lehendakari. Between the mid-1990s and the early years of this century, he became one of the most important figures in Basque politics, playing a prominent role in the talks with ETA during the 2004-2008 Spanish legislature. Ares has died at the Basurto Hospital, in Bilbao, as a result of complications that arose during the treatment of a disease that he had suffered for several years.

Rodolfo Ares Taboada's political militancy would be marked by his particular life path. The historical socialist was a son of the immigration that arrived in the Basque Country in the middle of the last century. He was born in the Galician town of Riós (Ourense), and his family moved to Bilbao when he was a child.

He grew up in Otxarkoaga, a working-class neighborhood built in record time to welcome the thousands of immigrants who came from other areas of Spain. He studied an industrial master's degree and, in 1977, joined the UGT and the PSOE. Six years later, in 1983, he was already a councilor in the Bilbao City Council. His connection to municipal politics would last for more than a decade, reaching the positions of deputy mayor and delegate of the Urban Planning, Circulation and Transport area, as well as spokesman for the socialist municipal group. In 1991 he was the Socialist candidate for mayor of Bilbao.

During the first years of the 1990s, Ares made his municipal activity compatible with his work in the Bizkaia Provincial Council, and in 1994 he made the leap to the Basque Parliament. By then he had already become number two in Biscayan socialism, still led by Redondo Terreros. In 1995 he reached the PSE Coordination and Organization Secretariat, becoming number two in Basque socialism, led by Ramón Jáuregui.

Those were still the times of understanding between the PSE and the PNV, which since 1987 had governed the Basque Government in coalition, with José Antonio Ardanza as lehendakari, and some of the main Basque institutions. However, after the Lizarra-Garazi pact (known as the Estella pact) in 1998, that formula broke down. Since then, with Nicolás Redondo Terreros as general secretary, Ares has adapted to a policy of frontal opposition to the PNV, installed on the path of sovereignty.

After the signing of the sovereignty pact, the PSE began a rapprochement with the Basque PP with the aim of reaching the lehendakaritza and dethroning the PNV. The culminating moment of that strategy was the 2001 elections, the most tense in memory in the Basque Country, plagued by terrorism and marked by political polarization. The Redondo Terreros-Mayor Oreja entente did not achieve its electoral objective, and the leader of the Basque socialists ended up leaving the party.

The moments of greatest political relevance for Ares would come from then on, from the hand of the next general secretary of the Basque socialists, Patxi López, from 2002.

The politician from Otxarkoaga became the axis on which the politics of the Basque socialists revolved. The PSE did not take a step without counting on their approval. Ares was involved in everything and talked to everyone, including Batasuna and ETA.

Following the breakdown of the ETA truce linked to the Lizarra-Garazi Pact, terrorist violence had intensified. In the year 2000 they murdered 23 people, and in 2001 15 more. Among his victims during those years were socialists such as Fernando Buesa, Juan Mari Jauregi, Ernest Lluch, Froilán Elespe, Juan Priede or Joseba Pagazaurtundua. In that terrible climate, however, a small group of Basque socialists, led by Jesús Eguiguren, opened a channel for dialogue with the nationalist left, first, and with ETA, later. The goal was to hasten the end of terrorism by offering a landing strip to those who chose to lay down their arms.

From that bet would come the conversations in the Txillarre de Elgoibar farmhouse, those of Loiola or those that were held in different cities of Europe. And from that path, although with several ups and downs, the definitive end of ETA violence would also come, already in 2011. Rodolfo Ares came to participate in conversations with ETA members in Geneva.

Basque politics in recent decades cannot be understood without the shortlist made up in those years by Patxi López, Jesús Eguiguren and Ares himself, with Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba as a reference in Madrid.

That attempt to end the violence through dialogue, linked to the truce of 2006, was cut short with the attack on the T-4 in Barajas, although it laid the foundations for the definitive end of terrorism. Those years, however, were tremendously hard for Basque socialism, with a trickle of attacks and continuous attacks on its headquarters. Rodolfo Ares was then the one who picked up the phone to inform his fellow party members of the most painful news.

In 2009, with the nationalist left outlawed and thanks to the support of the PP, Patxi López became the first socialist lehendakari. Ares would be his right hand in a Basque Government that would not achieve the objectives that it set for itself at its inauguration, although it would manage to normalize the change in Euskadi.

Rodolfo Ares would occupy the portfolio of Minister of the Interior, promoting what he called a policy of "zero tolerance with the justification and support for ETA." His tenure, however, was punctuated by several controversies, with episodes as serious as the death of the Athletic Club fan Iñigo Cabacas, as a result of a hit by the Ertzaintza, during a police charge after a match of the Basque team in the Europa League.

The end of the government of Patxi López, replaced after the 2012 elections by Iñigo Urkullu, opened the final stage of Ares in Basque politics. In 2014 he left the leadership of the PSE, and in 2016 he decided to leave his seat in the Basque Parliament. Before finally leaving politics, he made the leap to Madrid to help Pedro Sánchez and became one of the pillars of his team. The Otxarkoaga politician came to participate in the negotiating commission for the failed investiture of Sánchez in 2016.

In recent years, however, he remained away from politics and suffered from serious health problems.

The words of Patxi López, devastated by his death, are perhaps the ones that best summarize the feeling of Basque socialism after his death: “Today is one of those days in which pain invades everything. Devastated by the death of my friend Rodolfo Ares. I think of his family and I think of the life he gave us. An irreplaceable resistant. Euskadi and Spain will always be in your debt”.