Esquerra has grown a mushroom just when it was unloading its artillery against Junts per Catalunya for considering that its position on immigration can be explained by the “fear” that the far-right pro-independence formation Aliança Catalana would take votes from them. The white brand of Oriol Junqueras in the town of Ribera d’Ondara (Segarra) is negotiating with the only councilor of the Islamophobic formation in the town, Albert Puig, to unseat the mayor, from the PSC.
The national leadership of ERC has shown deep disagreement with this possible understanding and, as he points out, has communicated to the number one of the party in Ribera d’Ondara, Elisabet Jové, of his suspension as a militant and has put leave the “disciplinary mechanisms that can lead to expulsion”. The other two councilors are independent, so ERC cannot act against them.
La Ribera d’Ondara has about 450 inhabitants and the full council is made up of only three members of the PSC, three more of the republicans and the councilor of the formation that leads from Ripoll Sílvia Orriols. The censure motion would go ahead if the opposition agreed. Sources from the Socialists claim that they offered to the ERC group to put the disagreements behind them, but, according to these same sources, the Republicans refused, considering that their decision was not “reversible”.
The position of his local group (Municipal Agreement – ??ERC) is in line with the national headquarters of Esquerra, especially if you take into account that Junqueras four days earlier had railed against JxCat’s speech on immigration. “Embracing the discourses of the extreme right that criminalize migrants, far from solving situations of poverty and exclusion, puts at risk social cohesion, a country shared with everyone who lives there and its incorporation into the national project. We play a lot,” wrote the president of the Republicans at the time.
To top it all off, Or-riols added fuel to the fire through the X platform. Upon learning that the republicans had started the procedures to expel the spokeswoman of the local group, the mayoress of Ripoll and leader of the xenophobic party he wrote: “ERC, a party that tolerates and invests in Spanishism but does not support the sanity of the Catalan Alliance”.
ERC-la Ribera d’Ondara justifies the agreement with Aliança Catalana due to the disagreement on the budgets. The republicans warned on December 2 that the mayor Francesc Sabanés had to do “a good rethink”. Otherwise, they indicated the possibility of “forcing a change of government”.
This Monday ERC announced that the municipal government “is already in discount time” and that it should assume, “out of respect for all our voters and all the neighbors”, that the four councilors of the opposition take “seriously the possibility of reaching an agreement, to make a change of government”.
The reaction of the national management of ERC arrived on Monday evening. He warned that there is no place for pacts that include the participation of “any formation that opposes xenophobic and fascist approaches”, and referred to the party statutes to warn that the motion of censure could constitute “a very serious fault that could lead to in the expulsion of those who have a militant relationship with the party”.
