From my personal interpretation, the Statute establishes the Government as the institution of reference inside and outside the Basque Country.
The Basque Government is elected by the Parliament, seat of the popular sovereignty of the citizens of the Basque Country, and develops the central body of the country’s backbone. Its charge and custody are the pillars of the Basque social welfare system that are none other than Education and Health but simultaneously it acts in practically all the necessary competences for the social, economic, environmental and cultural construction of our society.
Throughout all these years of self-government, the Government has been equipping itself with a body of civil servants who make government policies a reality. Simultaneously, it has also generated a series of institutions, agencies, entities, companies, para-public foundations and other satellite organizations of the Administration itself that act through various legal and associative formulas. These organizations have emerged over time to respond to various management or competency-building needs.
It remains pending that the incoming government finally decides to analyze and, where appropriate, courageously and decisively reformulate this para-institutional fabric. In some cases, it will try to update the functions or the internal organization of those that are no longer effective and, in others, it will directly try to dismantle those that are not necessary at all or that have never fulfilled the objective for which they were created.
At times, an attempt will also be made to open a broader rationalization process to incorporate other equivalent agents created by local institutions in the country (town councils or councils) that operate in areas of competence that are naturally attributable to the general administration of the Basque Country and that They have emerged as a consequence of imprecise legislation on powers and a widespread practice of intervening in any type of matter related to the public by any institution, regardless of its capacity or opportunity. This approach will require even clearer leadership if possible from the Government and surely from the incoming lehendakari.
In another order of things, it is also this institutional framework created in parallel to the administration itself that often squeaks among the citizens and contributes, to some extent, to the discredit that the political class, in general, has been carving for itself throughout of the years. Citizens, without going into assessing their effectiveness or opportunity, sometimes doubt the existence of sufficient democratic control of these organizations by the representative institutions of society and, rather than as instruments of government action, they are sometimes perceived as legal formulas for the arbitrary assignment of jobs without free competition. One more reason for its reform.