Triumph of the pro-independence ultra-right in Ripoll, the municipality of the 17-A terrorists
Sílvia Orriols, who these days has become the media face of the extreme right-wing pro-independence in Catalonia, defined her clear victory in the municipal elections of Ripoll (Gerona) as “a posthumous tribute to the victims of the 17-A attack” and a position “to in favor of the West and against Islamic fundamentalism”. The co-founder and candidate of Aliança Catalana, with 30.8% of the votes and six councilors out of 17, was one of the most prominent names among the secondary actors on the night of 28-M in the autonomous community and currently represents , a headache for Junts, ERC, PSC and CUP, who are debating the pros and cons of imposing a sanitary cordon that prevents the xenophobic leader from becoming mayoress on June 17.
The results of the Catalan ultra-right in the recent local elections were discreet, but cases like Ripoll's prove that identity and anti-immigration discourse can permeate the electorate when a cocktail of various factors is used, such as the perception of insecurity among the citizenship, something common to many other towns, the disenchantment with the more traditional parties or, in the particular case of the Girona municipality, the scars that have not yet healed from the terrorist attack in August 2017 in Barcelona and Cambrils (Tarragona), perpetrated by young people from the town with Maghrebi ancestry.
Ripoll, a town of 10,600 inhabitants, came to the fore less than six years ago for being the nucleus where the jihadist cell that organized those attacks was formed. “The concept of integration in which we had believed and had been working for years was put in check,” explains a public administration social worker in Ripoll in 800 meters, the documentary series directed by Elías León Siminiani about 17-A and its context.
Whether as mayoress or as an opposition councilor, this will not be the first time that Orriols steps on the City Hall. In the 2019 elections, then as head of the Front Nacional de Catalunya (FNC), he managed to enter the City Council with about 10% of the votes. In those elections, Som Catalans, another formation with a similar creed, gained 2.1% of support that would have led to a second councilor on the Orriols list. That was the first notice that the residual pro-independence extreme right could end up finding its space in some local institutions.
Demonstration in Ripoll after the terrorist attacks of August 2017.
This 28-M, Aliança Catalana also managed to enter with a mayor in Manlleu (Barcelona) and in Ribera d'Ondara, a small municipality in Lérida. The FNC from which Orriols broke ties three years ago won on May 28 with an absolute majority in La Masó (Tarragona) and obtained two councilors in a medium-sized city like Manresa (Barcelona), where Vox has also entered with one.
Joseph Anglada
Although with identity ties unrelated to the independence movement, in Vic (Barcelona) an old acquaintance of the Catalan extreme right will return to the Consistory, Josep Anglada (Som Identitaris), protagonist just over a decade ago of the first ultra-conservative irruption in the institutions in Spain after its decline after the Transition. His Platform for Catalonia (PxC) achieved 67 councilors in the region in the 2011 municipal elections, a year after having been one step away from entering Parliament in the 2010 regional elections.
As happened with other parties, the procés also made a dent in PxC, which in 2014 suffered the split of a sector of independence ideology that would end up creating Som Catalans. After the poor results in the 2015 municipal elections (eight councilors), Plataforma signed its dissolution in 2019 and a large part of its cadres ended up joining Vox. The success of Anglada's anti-immigration speech, a former Fuerza Nueva militant, even led the mayor of Vic between 2007 and 2015, the Christian Democrat Josep Maria Vila d'Abadal (CiU), to propose registering only immigrants with residence permits , which left those who did not have it out of public services such as health. The leader of Unió Democràtica was disavowed by the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
In a few days it will be known if Orriols is proclaimed mayor of Ripoll for the next four years or if a cordon sanitaire as the one that has already worked during the mandate that now concludes prevents the leader of Aliança Catalana to pick up the baton of command that since 2011 has been in the hands of Jordi Munell (CiU and Junts). The rest of the forces of the Consistory agreed in 2019 not to approve the motions presented by the then councilor of the FNC. But the multiplication of popular support obtained by the radical leader in the last municipal elections has opened doubts about whether a new veto can be counterproductive in the next appointment with the polls or if it will achieve that the success of the Catalan far-right in the town is ephemeral and follow a path similar to that of Plataforma per Catalunya in the last decade.