It is less than four months to know if Ipar Euskal Herria, for the first time, is going to achieve the institutional identity for Euskal Herria. The French State is about to respond to the old demand for knowledge, contributing to the creation of a single community that brings together all peoples. However, both the word and the decision are in the hands of the electorate. In the first phase, the municipalities had the opportunity to consult on the project that the prefect put on the table at the end of last year. It was a participation that no one had foreseen and was decided by all the councils of the people, with a large majority of votes in favour. We are in a second phase, in which a committee composed of elected representatives from all over the Department can adopt amendments if the majority of two-thirds declare themselves in favour. The famous jauntto of Amikuze, Barthélémy Aguerre, has brought a proposal to unite his region with Bearne, but has managed to gather very few votes. Apparently, no one is going to propose anything else to cast doubt on the prefect’s proposal. The third decisive phase will be extended from the end of March and extended for 75 days, in which the buildings will have to speak in each locality, if not. Finally, during the second half of the year, the drafting of the Collegiate Statutes, the selection of competences and the consolidation of taxation should go hand in hand with the political pacts for the College to become operational on 1 January 2017.

In the midst of this journey, some of the voters who have been very critical of the project, including four of the large urban areas, have just presented a new proposal: to turn the ten communities of today into eight, applying the exceptions of the law, and to create a pole of coordination between them. A proposal made with every right can be thankful from the point of view of democratic debate, but that cat, however, has another tail. It has been significant that in the presentation press conference some of the interior mentioned the concern for the superiority of the coast, while those of the adjoining urban center denounced in the collegial assembly an excessive number of representatives of the interior. The proposal is not a credible alternative for the out-of-date presentation of the procedure and its weaknesses. The map of the eight colleges has not been presented and forgets the prefect’s promise to divide the North into three if the hypothesis of a single community is lost. They do not say that the presence of the whole territory is not guaranteed in that pole. It is an attempt to federate all the ghosts, all those who break the fear and the unspeakable, that is, one of the two majorities that the single community must achieve in the third phase, half of the peoples who represent half of the population. They will hardly succeed, but there has never been such a crude polarisation in the political class of Iparralde.