The people of Ripoll are fed up with a political correction that has left the municipality devastated and appreciate that someone has had the courage to tell the City Council what they all think in the dining room at home”, says SÃlvia Orriols, head of the list of Aliança Catalana, which with a clear anti-immigration speech, became on Sunday, against all odds, the most voted force in Ripoll, unseating Junts, which has governed for the last 12 years, with Jordi Munell at the helm.
Abstention aside, Junts, which presented Manoli Vega as a candidate, has lost five councilors in these elections, the same number that Aliança has won, which in the previous mandate, with the very recent attacks in Barcelona, ​​was presented with the acronym of the National Front of Catalonia (FNC), and obtained a councillor. The xenophobic party forced Orriols to tone down her criticism of immigration, which is why she dissociated herself from these acronyms and ended up co-founding Aliança, which in these elections presented itself with the apocalyptic slogan “Save Ripoll”. The results now give him the upper hand to rule, but some residents are pleading with the other forces to avoid it. In favor, they say, of “coexistence”. “I would never have imagined this racism here; I hope they will come together to prevent her from being mayor”, says Núria, a woman who does not want to give her last name. Most of those who speak out, camouflage their identity. “People in Ripoll are tolerant, they are not xenophobic, but she has been brave to say what she thinks and many people have bought her speech”, says another woman who prefers anonymity.
Ripoll is not a tense society like the one left by the attacks of 17-A committed by radicalized young people from the municipality. “Now that we had a good coexistence again after that, if he accedes to the mayor’s office, the atmosphere will become rarer”, says Saber Oukabir, a relative of two of the terrorists who attacked the Rambla, now married to a Catalan woman and father of a child The electoral results have once again placed the focus on this municipality of around 11,000 inhabitants and a low immigration ratio of 13%, compared to others in the province. Aliança Catalana, a Catalan independence party with Islamophobic proclamations, obtained 30% of the vote, a figure that earned them six councilors, twice as many as Junts or ERC.
With this data, it is not difficult to find neighbors walking around Ripoll who verbalize the slogans that Orriols has repeated in the campaign, in the meeting room or on social networks, which he uses assiduously to convey his messages, mainly against cabbage Maghrib group. “People have woken up and the town is fed up,” says a 59-year-old resident. When we ask him what he is fed up with, he says: “Immigrants have all kinds of aid and those here, who are going through bad times, don’t get anything; people see it but don’t say anything out of fear, but they have already spoken at the polls… and the attacks had nothing to do with it,” he says. Juanita and Maria, two elderly sisters, speak in a similar vein. “In life there must be a balance, it cannot be that some have so much and others nothing… And this is not racism, but justice”, insists one of them. The generalization outrages the foreign community. “I’ve lived here for 17 years and I’ve never asked for anything, I pay for everything I have with my salary,” says a woman from the Dominican Republic.
Given this, the still-mayor Jordi Munell criticizes himself. “Their fake news has helped to generate rumors that have created suspicions, maybe we should have stopped them earlier, we made the mistake of not giving much importance to their fallacies thinking that they would fall under their own weight, but no it has been like that”. Wafa Marsi, who was a mediator when the terrorist attacks in Barcelona took place, believes that it is time for administrations and political parties to deny their proclamations to prevent “the ball from getting even bigger”.
