The UPN is a seperate party from the PP in the same way the the CSU is to the CDU in Germany.

Yup, the interesting thing is that after the initial split the PP tried to compete with UPN in Navarra and failed miserably.

I see the Catalan Socialists (PSC) moving ina similar direction with respect to the PSOE [which is already a "federal" party, by the way]. In fact, the Catalan senators were not elected for PSC/PSOE but for Entesa Catalana de Progrès (Catalan Progressive Entente) which includes ERC and IC/Verts, the same parties making up the Catalan government right now.

The thing about Navarra is that in the mountains in the north it's basically an extension of th Basque country, being heavily Basque, and basque nationalist voters.  

Navarra may well be, like Batasuna says, the backbone of the Basque question, because it has strong Basque nationalism of the PNV/ETA variety (still only about 10% of the vote, though), strong traditionalist Basque nationalism (Carlism), and then Spanish parties. The UPN situation is an alliance of convenience where the Spanish centralists join the Navarran right-wing foralists because they can't beat them.

YOu know more than I do about Navarra since you actually lived there [right?], so maybe you should be the one to write the Navarran diary. Or maybe we should keep the current successful format where I write the diary to inform myself and you poke holes in it desde la barrera.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman