If yesterday it was the leadership of Junts that opted to draw a sanitary cordon to the extreme right in Ripoll, represented by the Aliança Catalana, even disavowing its president, Laura Borràs, this Tuesday the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont, without organic charges in the party but with enormous influence in it, has suggested that his formation must accept the agreement that the ERC, PSC and the CUP have already signed to prevent Sílvia Orriols from reaching the mayoralty of the Girona municipality.
Puigdemont has recommended on his social networks the reading of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which he has described as “a red line to limit who you can understand and who you can’t” and has asked that when agreeing begin with “ratify and respect the Charter”. “It is thanks to this Charter that we have opened useful cracks for the defense of Catalonia and that we can defend ourselves as a national minority; that we will be able to defend much better the violations of our linguistic rights”, recalled Puigdemont.
In this sense, the former president of Junts has placed special emphasis on article 21 of the Charter, which prohibits “any discrimination exercised on the grounds of sex, race, color, ethnic or social origins, genetic characteristics, language, religion or beliefs , political or any other opinion, belonging to a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation”.
Puigdemont does not mention Orriols, or Aliança Catalana, or Ripoll, or even any party, but he points out that City Councils have “an essential responsibility in the dissemination and protection” of the aforementioned principles. “Talking to its citizens about what these rights represent, and demanding their respect, seems to me an increasingly priority function,” says Puigdemont, for whom “ensuring security and coexistence is ensuring fundamental rights, as is ensuring so that each one can profess his beliefs”. All of this in veiled allusions to the extreme right-wing pro-independence party that won the municipal elections in Ripoll, which in recent years has not hesitated to point to the Muslim group as responsible for the problems of the municipality.
“Everything has some fundamental rules, of course: no model of life that threatens any of the fundamental rights is tolerable,” says the former president in an apparent allusion to certain aspects of Islam, such as the role of women in this group. “But it is necessary to fight within the framework, precisely, of those same fundamental rights”, adds the MEP, who acknowledges that “it is difficult and sometimes full of contradictions”, but -he warns- “the only alternative to this is hell”.
Puigdemont’s words come after yesterday the Junts candidate for mayor of Ripoll, Manoli Vega, acknowledged to La Vanguardia that all options are still open, including giving Orriols the leadership rod. “It seems that this is becoming a matter of the country, when it is a question of Ripoll. What we cannot allow is that a pact be imposed on us from Barcelona, ??because we are the ones who will have to explain it to our citizens. The people are divided ”, explained the Junts candidate in Ripoll yesterday.
Vega, after recalling that Aliança Catalana obtained 30.7% of the votes (almost double that of Junts) and was the first force in the 13 municipal tables, does not hide that she is in favor of letting Orriols govern in a minority and be seen forced to negotiate with the rest of the formations, without ruling out presenting, when the time comes, a motion of censure. “When you talk to the townspeople, it’s what they want. And it tells you above all people who have not voted for it ”, argues the JxCat candidate.
For her part, the ERC candidate for mayor of Ripoll, Chantal Pérez, in statements this Tuesday in RAC1 has shown herself confident that Junts will agree to join the agreement that, in fact, would make her mayor and has made self-criticism about what happened in Ripoll at the time that he has branded Sílvia Orriols as an ultra-Catholic and has judged her to be an extreme right because in the municipal plenary sessions of the last four years she has dedicated herself to “pointing out and stigmatizing” a “specific” group – the Islamic – as “guilty of all the ills of our society”. Asked about the possibility of letting the ultra-right govern to present a motion of no confidence later to expose it, Pérez has acknowledged that assuming that Orriols is going to govern badly is assuming too much and has admitted that they are not entitled to say so.
