A Deadly Poison

Sílvia Orriols began her political life in Ripoll, a town of just under 10,000 inhabitants in inland Catalonia, with an immigration rate of 14 percent (slightly lower than the Catalan average). The first political grouping Orriols created was Els Intransigents, on whose website one can still read messages about the superiority of the Catalan ‘race’ and the need to protect the purity of the ‘nation’. For example:

Demographic invasions have ravaged our Homeland. The enemy’s seed has spread across our land like a deadly poison. A poison that easily wipes out the surnames of our ancestors, an efficient venom that dilutes the Catalan blood we inherited … The only thing that can save Catalonia is the fact that Catalans are born. Either we grow our lineage, or castile [written with a lowercase C] will devour us.

It is assumed that Orriols is the author of these articles, something she has never denied.

Despite Orriols’s disdain for a lower-case Castile, increasingly it is further-flung ‘invaders’ that are her main target. A key moment in her political biography is the jihadist attack of 17 August 2017, which killed 16 people on La Rambla in Barcelona. Several of the attackers were from Ripoll, which spurred Orriols and her followers’ xenophobic shift. The main enemy of Catalonia was no longer the ‘Castilians’, but migrants – especially Muslims.

In 2019, she was elected councillor for the Front Nacional de Catalunya, a nationalist party with virtually no institutional presence. Then, a year later, she founded Aliança Catalana, continuing her path from Ripoll’s local council to larger-scale Catalan politics. In 2023, she was elected mayor of Ripoll, and in 2024 she entered the Catalan Parliament for the first time.

At first glance, the far right may seem to have little representation in Catalonia. But when Aliança Catalana’s two MPs are added to Vox’s 11, they are a sizable grouping. Together they obtained nearly 12 percent of the vote in the 2024 elections – a combined percentage that could rise to 17 percent in the next ballot according to the latest CEO poll. The end of the Catalan independence process has pushed the national question into the background, allowing the racist rhetoric and anti-immigration legislative initiatives of both parties to reinforce one another.

The two formations have voted together on several occasions, and Vox’s general secretary, Santiago Abascal, celebrated ‘the rise of Aliança Catalana, because it is bringing the debate on illegal migration to the fore with more force’. Polls show little crossover between the electorates of the two far-right parties, which facilitates an implicit understanding between these unlikely allies – one in favour of Catalan independence, the other a defender of a neo-Francoist and uniform vision of Spain.

Post-Referendum Blues

Aliança Catalana was founded in 2020, just over two years after the 1 October 2017 referendum, the high point of a vast social and political movement that demanded Catalonia’s separation from Spain. By the time the pandemic hit, the independence movement was already worn down by a lack of concrete political results – and also by police and judicial repression, which caused injuries, fines and prison sentences for hundreds of activists and political leaders on 1 October and in its aftermath (many of these punishments were later overturned by the Amnesty Law). Today, only 38 percent of Catalans support independence, and the Socialist Party, which advocates for Catalonia’s autonomy within a united Spain, holds the reins of power.

Orriols’s party has benefited from the frustration caused by the end of the process: many habitual voters for Junts (centre-right), Esquerra Republicana (centre-left), and CUP (left) are disillusioned with these parties, which have lost electoral support in recent years. Ten percent of Junts voters say they are willing to shift to Aliança Catalana, causing panic within the ranks of Carles Puigdemont’s party.

As with other European conservative parties threatened by a far-right alternative, Junts has chosen to adopt part of Orriols’s xenophobic discourse to try to stop the voter drain. They demanded that Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE – which relies on their parliamentary support in the Spanish Congress – transfer migration powers to Catalonia in order to promote restrictive migration policies. Furthermore, they have increasingly linked insecurity with immigration in their rhetoric (a common theme among the far right), calling for the expulsion of foreign residents who commit crimes. When deployed in other European contexts, this strategy has only served to normalise racist discourse and inflate far-right support.

Other parties and the media also bear some responsibility for AC’s entry into the Catalan Parliament. During the 2024 election campaign, Orriols’s party was not entitled to participate in debates or receive regulated media airtime, as it lacked parliamentary representation. However, attacking the ultras became a way for other parties to attract public attention during the campaign, as the media were eager to exploit the sensationalism generated by Orriols’s xenophobic and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Meanwhile, the international context has compounded Aliança Catalana’s growth. Its rise coincides with some of the major victories for the global far right, especially Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Although Sílvia Orriols, who has scarcely travelled outside Catalonia, does not seem particularly focused on international affairs, some of her advisers are, and the party congratulated Trump on his second presidential victory.

An interesting caveat here is that Aliança Catalana does not share the American Republican obsession with feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. The Catalan ultras are closer to Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who is less reactionary on gender and sexual diversity issues, and more open regarding moral topics such as abortion or euthanasia. In this respect, Aliança Catalana differs from Vox, which is ultra-conservative and aligned with traditional Catholic morality.

Fighting the Right

All polls show steady growth for Aliança Catalana, which hopes to increase its institutional power in the 2027 local elections thanks to considerable support in small and medium-sized towns in inland Catalonia. The growth of the party shows how the far right is capable of adapting to different environments in order to assert its priority: opposition to immigration and cultural diversity, with the Muslim population as the main target. While positions may vary on gender or sexual diversity, or even on the national conflict that has structured Catalan politics for years, the essential components of the far-right formula remain.

Most Catalans think that immigration enriches the country both economically and culturally. However, the rise of the far right in other European countries reminds us that the most important factor here is the ability of these parties to channel the anxieties of an era marked by growing inequality and uncertainty towards racist ends. Hopefully, other parties will understand that the only effective way to confront the far right is to address the root of these fears – not to make concessions to their discourse.