The Gate of Aliança

The Catalan Alliance phenomenon continues to fuel editorial production. Time will tell whether Sílvia Orriols's party maintains the growth predicted by the polls or fades away. It wouldn't be the first case. Politics, like the world of entertainment, creates these kinds of shooting stars. But the Catalan Alliance seems to have its stars aligned. That's why it's unnerving some of its opposing parties and sparking media interest. At the same time, there are many unanswered questions.

From this prominence in the Catalan political scene, Aliança Catalana: els nostres ultres (Catalan Alliance: Our Ultres) by journalist Xavier Rius Sant has reached bookshops. This is a detailed portrait of how this pro-independence and Islamophobic far-right movement emerged and grew, based on a double circumstance: the frustration of a part of Catalan society that believed in the promise of independence, and the indignation at the fact that the perpetrators of the attacks of 17 August 2017 in Barcelona and Cambrils were boys from Ripoll, children of Moroccan immigrants, who spoke Catalan and considered themselves integrated.

The book describes Orriols as someone “with little capacity for empathy.”

Ripoll is the starting point for the Catalan Alliance. There, Orriols, an administrative assistant and mother of five, won a council seat in 2019 with the National Front of Catalonia—another far-right party—and four years later, the mayor's office, now with the Catalan Alliance, a party created in 2020 and whose expansion. Rius Sant details the key behind-the-scenes role played by figures such as Jordi Aragonès, Oriol Gès, Eduard Llaguno, and Maiol Sanaüja.

The deputy of Aliança Catalana Sílvia Orriols, during the control session in the Parliament

Nico Tomás / ACN

The author, an expert on immigration and the far right, describes Orriols as a "self-made person with little capacity for empathy," who took his first flight on an official trip to Italy in 2019 and stayed in the hotel in his free time, avoiding socializing with the hosts and other councilors. To illustrate his "ethnicist ideology," the book reproduces excerpts from the blog of the Els Intransigents collective, led by a young Orriols, in which he attacks Castilian immigration, in the same way he would later point to Muslims.

Regarding the rise of the ultras, the author points out that they are filling the void left by other parties and points to a leftist party responsible for this rise, which "looks the other way" in the face of imams who spread a religion and culture that controls all spheres of life, and which has an entry point but no exit point. This is the one that Aliança is also exploiting.