Izaskun Bilbao Barandica

Who is Izaskun Bilbao Barandica?

Izaskun Bilbao Barandica is a politician from the Basque Country, a region in Spain. A member of the Basque Nationalist Party, she was the President of the Basque Parliament in the 2005-2009 term, being elected to the office as a "consensus candidate" among the nationalist majority in the legislature when the incumbent President and initial candidate of her party, Juan María Atutxa, failed to obtain the majority and the election deadlocked. She has a degree in Law.

In 2008, she was in the center of a controversy regarding the placement of the Spanish flag in the seat of the Basque Parliament: the Spanish Law on Flags requires that all public institutions place the Spanish flag on a prominent place wherever the regional or local flags fly. After years of not submitting to such law and flying only the Ikurriña, the Spanish Supreme Court ruled that the Basque Parliament would have to fly the Spanish flag too. In the Bureau meeting that studied the ruling, Izaskun Bilbao sided with the non-nationalist minority in the Parliament ruling body to actually place the flag against the official policy of her party. She defended this decision as simply obeying the final ruling of the Supreme Court, and thus having nothing to do with politics.