Months ago there was no political analyst in Catalonia who did not predict that immigration was going to be one of the big issues, if not the main one, of the Catalan electoral campaign. With four days left until it ends, his predictions have not come true. Quite the opposite.
The main candidates, those with the greatest expectations of obtaining the best results next Sunday, May 12, have, for now, decided to ignore the debate.
It is still surprising: further north, in England, the disastrous policy, also on immigration, of the conservative Rishi Sunak – who began to detain asylum seekers in the middle of the municipal campaign to take them to Rwanda – has sunk him definitely this weekend. In France, immigration is radioactive political material for Emmanuel Macron in his fight with Marine Le Pen. Not to mention Trump’s toxic crusade against Biden on the Mexican border.
The Catalan campaign seems to be circulating on other paths for the moment. On Saturday at noon the PP gathered about three thousand people in the Llefià neighborhood of Badalona. The popular candidate, Alejandro Fernández, accompanied by the president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the metropolitan political phenomenon, the mayor of Badalona Xavier Garcia Albiol, who made immigration one of his political banners, participated. On Saturday, during an hour and a half of speeches there was not a single explicit allusion to the newly arrived population.
Carles Puigdemont’s campaign, on the other side of the border, has also tiptoed around the issue. In fact, in only one of his rallies held in Argelers de la Marenda, last Thursday – dedicated to sympathizers and militants from central Catalonia – did the electoral leader of Junts devote just over two minutes to addressing the issue. He was preceded in the use of the word by Ennatu Domingo who spoke from the rostrum in solid Catalan. Ennatu, born in Ethiopia, has a degree in politics from the University of Kent, is a member of Junts and is number 6 on the party list for Barcelona.
Shortly before starting the pre-campaign, Junts, probably shocked by the rise of the xenophobic candidacy of Aliança Catalana, launched an order to the central government demanding full powers over immigration for the Generalitat. Powers that included control over who arrives and who settles in Catalonia and the power to, if necessary, expel them from its territory. The anger was tremendous despite the fact that both the promoters of the measure and its detractors know for a fact that the control of immigration flows is today a European-wide chimera.
In his speech in Argelers last Thursday, Puigdemont did not mention this demand before the central government but, in the context of his exhortation on immigration, he pointed out that “there is a brutal imbalance, there is no right to what they are doing in Catalonia.” Did you mean that the Ministry of the Interior is deliberately sending more immigrants to Catalonia than to other areas of Spain? Whether that was what he meant was left up in the air. It didn’t happen from there.
At the same time as the event in Argelers, Vox militants held an important rally this Saturday in Salt that was attended by Santiago Abascal, the party leader, and Jorge Buixadé. Protected by a considerable deployment of the Mossos d’Esquadra, the voxistas cried out against immigration in a municipality where officially – the real figures are probably different – ??37% of the population was born outside of Spain. In this town on the outskirts of Girona, Vox has four councilors, one more than four years ago. Of everything said at this meeting, perhaps the most striking thing was hearing the deputy and first Vox candidate for Girona, Alberto Tarradas, affirm that “Catalan culture recedes where uncontrolled immigration advances.”
In a unique discursive communion with Tarradas, the independence candidacy of Aliança Catalana predicts the imminent disappearance of the Catalans in the face of barbarian invasions. Yesterday afternoon Silvia Orriols, the presidential candidate of this party, spoke at an event in Girona. Orriols’s campaign is an invisible one – he has not been able to participate in any electoral debate given that he is making his debut as a political force – and even on social networks it goes unnoticed and yet all the surveys place this party, in the worst of its predictions, with no less than two deputies in the future Parliament of Catalonia.
Meanwhile, the left-wing parties, the PSC, ERC – Pere Aragonés often insists in his speech on “sincere Catalunya” – and the Comuns, are dedicated to refuting xenophobic speeches – José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero did it yesterday in a rally with Salvador Illa in Lleida – wherever they occur but, in a certain sense, they also participate in the silent consensus regarding this debate.
The truth is that in a very few years Catalonia has reached eight million inhabitants and this growth is almost entirely due to the arrival of new citizens from other countries. That this objective fact is not part of a public and calm debate in the elections remains surprising. And looking to the future: perhaps the deliberate decision not to enter the field of play of Vox and Aliança Catalana is not the best of news.
