The President of the Basque Government ( eu, Eusko Jaurlaritzako lehendakaria, es, presidente del Gobierno Vasco), usually known in the Basque language as the Lehendakari ( eu, lehendakari, es, lendakari), is the head of government of the Basque Autonomous Community. The lehendakari leads the

executive branch The Executive, also referred as the Executive branch or Executive power, is the term commonly used to describe that part of government which enforces the law, and has overall responsibility for the governance of a State (polity), state. In poli ...

of the regional government. The current lehendakari is Iñigo Urkullu, of the

Basque Nationalist Party The Basque Nationalist Party (, EAJ ; es, Partido Nacionalista Vasco, PNV; french: Parti Nationaliste Basque, PNB; EAJ-PNV), officially Basque National Party in English,) was rejected by party members in November 2011. Nonetheless, the party did ...

. The Basque noun ''lehendakari'' means "president" and can refer to the president of any country, club, association etc.

History of the term

The term ''lehendakari'' is a 20th-century coinage, from the Basque ''lehendabizi'' ("first") and the

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...

-''ari'' which indicates a profession. Before the establishment of

Standard Basque Standard Basque ( eu, euskara batua or simply ''batua'') is a standardised version of the Basque language, developed by the Basque Language Academy in the late 1960s, which nowadays is the most widely and commonly spoken Basque-language version ...

in the

1970 Events January * January 1 – Unix time epoch reached at 00:00:00 UTC. * January 5 – The 7.1 Tonghai earthquake shakes Tonghai County, Yunnan province, China, with a maximum Mercalli intensity scale, Mercalli intensity of X (''Extrem ...

s, it was spelled ''Euzko Jaurlaritzaren Lendakari''. Both ''lendakari'' (president) and ''jaurlaritza'' (government) are Basque neologisms created by members of the

. The generic Basque words for " president" and " government" are both ''lehendakari(a)'' and ''presidente(a)'' for the former, and ''gobernu(a)'' for the latter, being ''presidente(a)'' and ''gobernu(a)'' words loaned from

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...

. Since the very moment when the noun ''lehendakari'' was coined, both ''lehendakari(a)'' and ''presidente(a)'' have been used as perfect synonyms to refer to the head of any public or private government organ. So ''lehendakari'', in Basque language, is not only the name of the president of the Basque autonomous community, but also the name officially used to refer to the head of the Chartered Community of Navarre, the head of a parliament, the head of a rugby club, the head of a hiring board, the head of a board of directors, etcetera. On the other hand, the word ''lehendakari'' is commonly used in Spanish, both in and outside the Basque region, to refer exclusively to the Basque president, comparable to the use of

Taoiseach The Taoiseach is the head of government, or prime minister, of Ireland. The office is appointed by the president of Ireland upon the nomination of Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Oireachtas, Ireland's national legislature) and the offi ...

as the title of the Irish head of government in English. Lehendakaris elected for the PNV have sworn office following a ritual established by Aguirre: next to the Guernica Tree, on a

Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts o ...

in Basque, using a symbolic formula which reads "before God, prostrated, standing on Basque land, remembering the ancestors, under the Guernica Tree and before you, representatives of the Basque people, I swear...". Former lehendakari Patxi López used a similar formula in the same place, but also included visible changes to it by suppressing the "before God, prostrated" part and the fact that he sworn on a Basque Statute of Autonomy rather than on a Bible.«López promete el cargo en Gernika sin humillarse ante dios»
''Publico'', 07/05/2009.

References

{{Authority control

History of the term

See also

References