For the first time since 1977 there were elections in the Basque Country were not every party was allowed to participate. Batasuna, AuB and several hundreds of local election platforms were excluded of participation. AuB and the local platforms participated however with self-made and self printed ballot- papers. The hunt by Spanish authorities for this papers was very intense in the days before the elections. Election meetings were closed down with violence.

Because the Spanish authorities would declare the votes for AuB unvalid, it was expected that a lot of people, traditionally voting for the left independentists, would choose for another Basque nationalist party to prevent the Spanish parties Partido Popular and PSOE of becoming the biggest party. Adding to that, by the last elections the left independists suffered a defeat already.

Despite all that, we can see that a big amount of the voters used the AuB ballot-papers and even became the biggest in some villages. In the whole of the Southern Basque Country AuB became the fourth biggest party. In the counting of the votes by the Spanish interior ministry the votes for AuB were declared non-valid. As an indication we counted out the non-valid votes by the last elections and added the results of the permitted left independentist lists and came to the following results:

Results in the four Spanish-Basque provinces:

Total votes: 1.583.483