The game of CAT AND MOUSE is becoming more like that of ETA’s communiqués and immediate valuations of the patriotic left. And unlike the song, this time there is a truce: “unconditional, permanent and irreversible”. On September 5, the nationalist left was quick to put the ETA communiqué in context and now in a similar way.

Addressing the signatories in Brussels, ETA says it is ready to “jointly analyze the steps required by the democratic solution, including the commitments to be made by ETA.” No more, no less. But in his assessment to the press in Bilbao the nationalist left has clearly seen that “the Basque actors are involved in the peace process and the irreversible democratic process”.

Given the nature of each one, it may simply be the ordering of the frame. But there are profound reasons to believe that these cuckoos are due to the dialectic within the Patriotic Left. In any case, the boat travels in the previously announced waters on its way to the pier of the Brussels Declaration. We can’t say in how many sequences we will see this entry, but the goal can’t be anything else. Or does anyone imagine ETA responding to Desmond Tutu, Frederik W. de Klerck, Mary Robinson and John Hume – with whom ETA has asked to meet, according to El País – with a no to the truce? It's hardly possible. And once that happens, as in Ireland, the next steps are on the political side, the Union. And then make some gesture to ETA with the guns and then...

The leader of the Union, Rufi Etxeberria, also spoke clearly in the interview offered in the Irish Times. The Nationalist Left insists that it foresees the future without acts of violence and that, in the event of violent acts, “those who carry them out will be excluded and opposed to the strategy adopted by our comrades”. Like he had said before, but Etxeberria is one of the few who says so firmly in public. A matter of authority.

EAJ IS ALSO STARTING TO WAKE UP, as it was difficult to understand how to keep himself in the same discourse as the PP and the PSE. And this is good for this process and for Basque society. Pressure issues for Egibar, Olano, etc.?

Or could one even think that the usual duplicity of the PNV – of looking at both the PSE and the SOB – is as effective as it used to be? Last Sunday was a good time for that, this time when it came to measuring the will of the patriotic left. According to Markel Olano in El Diario Vasco, “in our party’s contacts with the nationalist left we have seen very clearly that this has a firm and clear position.” The president of the EBB, Iñigo Urkullu, with his comments to El Correo on the same day, took away from Olano's opinion: “I want to think that in the Patriotic Left there are those who see that it is necessary to bet on political means.” The STATE and its representatives continue to move, but in the opposite direction, because there is nothing

to be done until ETA announces when and in what casern the weapons are delivered. Pulling the manual of counterinsurgency, hindrance, jamming and wedge, this is the attitude that the PSOE is showing for now. Maybe the PP does, but this card game can’t be profitable for the party that got involved in the Loyola conversation three years ago. But of course, everything could be better understood than a dignified exit from the conflict if the PSE is looking at what it can do together with the PP in municipal and provincial elections.