When it seemed that the reconciliation of the right in Spain would come at the hands of a Carles Puigdemont who passed through the amnesty and the Popular Party, the surprise arrived. Sílvia Orriols has become a reference for Santiago Abascal’s training. The leader of Aliança Catalana is not only looking for votes in the independence movement. The speech of the mayor of Ripoll causes a stir – curiously – among many young far-right people who defend the unity of Spain, and he never allows himself to be interviewed in a language other than Catalan, his own.
It’s increasingly common to see many Vox supporters sharing Orriols’ videos, lamenting that they “wish” their party would say the same thing. It doesn’t matter if he wants the independence of Catalonia or if he puts the “Spanish State” to shame. If many young people praise the leader of Aliança Catalana, it is simply because they see in her a figure who is freer from complexes than Santiago Abascal. The Catalan defines the pension system as a “pyramid scam” – only Ivan Espinosa de los Monteros, in 2019, dared to say something similar – and bases her criticism of immigration on the loss of identity, using it as a scapegoat for the decline of public services: Vox tends to focus on the history of crime.
So it is no longer necessary to speak Catalan in private, because Orriols speaks it in public and is understood perfectly in Madrid. It is curious to what extent the independence movement has stopped being seen as a threat, even if on even days the People’s Party and Vox split over the amnesty law. Carles Puigdemont has long been liked by many behind the scenes because he complicates the legislature for Pedro Sánchez. And the mayor of Ripoll now seems to be the missing link that the right needed to rebuild its bridges between Barcelona and Madrid.
The fact is that the Hurricane Orriols This does not leave Vox indifferent: they take it for granted that it will take away votes from them in Catalonia. For this reason, he asks in an interview with The avant-gardeAbascal confirmed a turning point in the immigration issue: he said that for a certain period it was possible to distinguish between migrants who “adapted” and those who did not adapt, but he believes that this screen is outdated. “This is not the time to say we want this type of immigration instead of another. That time is gone.” You can see the influence there horriolist. It is no coincidence that this summer Vox MEPs Hermann Tertsch and Juan Carlos Girauta argued on social networks with some like-minded young people. They criticized party leaders for defending Latino immigration. There is a pro-Hispanic soul in Abascal’s formation, based on shared cultural ties, in the wake of Isabel Díaz Ayuso. On the other hand, Aliança Catalana categorically opposes the arrival of any migrant, whether of Maghrebi or Latin origin, who does not assume the alleged “forms of Catalanness”. That’s why these young people like it so much.
It is proven that many young people close to Vox are even more right-wing than the leadership. As illustrated a few days ago The weekly countryAccording to CIS data, throughout our democracy there have always been oscillations: some cycles more to the left, others more to the right. However, after the transition we assist the most right-wing young people. The generational gap is evident in this too. Perhaps young people see the migrant as a competitor – more people looking for housing, for example – while they are the voter babyboomer of Vox has the most channeled life and does not compete in that register. On the contrary: he believes that foreigners play a role in the economy and the welfare state.
However, the leader of Aliança Catalana marks the distance. He says of Vox that it embodies a “retrograde and Francoist past”, while his party “claims a free, prosperous, safe and Western future”. It is true that Orriols resembles Marine Le Pen’s line in France on civil rights. For example, the LGTBI flag hangs in the mayor’s office of Ripoll, considering that Muslim immigration would not be compatible with certain values.
The problem for the right-wing Spaniards who are keeping an eye on Orriols is that for now she does not want to run in the elections to the Congress of Deputies of the “neighboring country”, as she calls Spain. However, Abascal left a mysterious message in that same interview The avant-garde: “I believe that the rejection of mass immigration of people influenced by Islamic fanaticism will unify Spain.” Time will tell if the axis of the Spanish and Catalan far right will be able to overcome the incipient agreement between Puigdemont and the PP, as in the best times between José María Aznar and Jordi Pujol’s Convergència i Unió. For now, Aliança Catalana is delighting the young people of Vox and a part of political Madrid, willing to sacrifice its purism to oust Sánchez from power and cement its new political order which, paradoxically, confines or shows amnesia regarding the territorial question.
