Unfortunately for Basques, they didn’t have a big brother next door. If France was majority Basque, it would have annexed the basque area of spain ages ago
The Basques did “win” in a sense. They got what their beef was about anyway, which was regional autonomy. They make their own local laws, they require the use of their own language, they set their own tax rates, etc. The whole problem started when the then-liberal Spanish state, in the 1830s, started eliminating the “fueros”, or charters of local rights.