The candidacy of the ultranationalist party Aliança Catalana, led by the mayor of Ripoll, Sílvia Orriols, has just entered Parliament. These are the lines with which this project of Islamophobic and anti-immigration postulates is defined, which in some aspects resemble those of Vox, and its independence proposal:
Orriols has no problem defining herself as “Islamophobic”, says that she is “scared” of Islam, “a political-religious ideology that tries to impose a model of life that is not compatible with Western values”, and accuses immigrants of be a source of crime, of keeping public aid and causing an ethnic substitution that is on the way to suffocating Catalan identity.
They are expressions common to those of other far-right groups in Europe, which claim to be “feminist” for appealing to Muslim women to “free themselves” from the Islamic veil, although Orriols, unlike Vox, is not opposed to the LGTBI cause. and even hung the rainbow flag on the balcony of the town hall.
A video of a fragment of an interview is circulating on networks in which Orriols states: “I believe that the electorate that is voting for Vox right now will largely come to Aliança Catalana”, a subtle recognition that, despite the differences in flags , between it and those of Santiago Abascal there are certain communicating vessels.
In the debate on independence, they could not be further apart, but their belligerence against “illegal immigration”, especially against Muslims, and the cordon sanitaire to which they are subject place them in the same trench in some areas.
Vox sources emphasize that their national principles are irreconcilable with those of Orriols, but they admit that in this legislature they may end up “voting together” many times on immigration issues, so everything indicates that they will be both things at the same time: staunch enemies. and circumstantial allies.
Orriols confesses that she was a great admirer of Carles Puigdemont when in 2017 he promoted the unilateral independence referendum: “I followed him everywhere, I trusted him, I voted for him, I toured Europe to support him, but in the end you realize that all these leaders “They have limited themselves to defending their position of power within their parties,” he explained in an interview with Gemma Nierga on La 2.
Faced with the supposed lukewarmness of the parties that she disparagingly calls “process-oriented”, Orriols advocates a unilateral declaration of independence (DUI) that is not suspended “after eight seconds” as Puigdemont did, but rather is defended tooth and nail and allows establishing “a new Catalan legality” that automatically repeals Spanish laws, so that any retaliation from Madrid would be considered “foreign aggression.”
Many heard her name for the first time after the 2023 municipal elections, when she rang the bell at the polls and won the position of mayor of Ripoll (Girona), but she had already been active on social networks for some time, where she had built a profile. controversial, politically incorrect, with a hammering of xenophobic messages.
Sílvia Orriols Serra (Vic, Barcelona, ??1984), mother of five children, graduated in Library and Documentation from the University of Vic, is not a newcomer to the political space of identity nationalism, but has already been a member of the Estat Català – under whose acronym He participated in the 2004 European elections, belonged to an association with the explicit name “Els Intransigents” and joined the far-right group Front Nacional de Catalunya (FNC).
He entered the Ripoll City Council in 2019 as councilor of the FNC, from which he split the following year to found Aliança Catalana, a political artifact that has been gaining weight stealthily, thanks to two factors: the disaffection of a part of the independence movement, which accuses ERC, JxCat and the CUP about not going all out, and the impact caused by the 2017 jihadist attacks in Catalonia, whose mastermind was Abdelbaki Es Satty, imam of Ripoll.
