The Catalan Alliance offered the expelled former Junts MP the chance to be the candidate for Lleida.

BarcelonaCristina Casol could have occupied a seat in this legislature. The former Junts MP had an offer on the table in the last elections that would have returned her to Parliament. According to ARA, the Catalan Alliance proposed her to be the candidate for Lleida. Casol was expelled from Junts at the end of the previous term, in January 2024, and became an unaffiliated deputy after she reported her group for sexism in Parliament and the chamber dismissed the case due to lack of evidence. The early elections put an end to her first term in the chamber, but her political career could have continued. This time, in a far-right party like Aliança.

The offer made to her by the ultra-independence party was made official at a meeting with the Lleida district's members held at the Casal de Cervera on March 22, less than two months before the May 12, 2024, elections in Parliament, where the secretary of organization and finance was also present. "The meeting was called exclusively to present the top of the list," stated various members present at the meeting.

Casol, speaking with ARA, initially admitted that she was offered the position of candidate, but later clarified that she was simply asked to be on the list. "They made me an offer to lead the list for Lleida, and I told them I would think about it," she notes. However, she asserts that they did not clarify "the specific position" and that it was not "firm," despite acknowledging that they were after her. "They spent some time celebrating me," she explains, while revealing that the party that ran in the elections with the tandem of Clara Ponsatí and Jordi Graupera, and the National Front of Catalonia also approached her. The first contact was at a meeting in Ripoll a few weeks after her expulsion from Junts, where the party's leader, Sílvia Orriols, and Gès, opened the doors to the party. The argument was that they were interested in having people from the Junts orbit, with whom they maintain a cross-party vote.

The surprise came two weeks after the summit in Cervera. According to the same sources, Silvia Orriols, who had the final say, rejected Casol's candidate because she wanted someone from the party. For this reason, she opted for Ramon Abad, Aliança's strongman in Lleida, who would ultimately lead the electoral campaign. According to the same sources, Silvia Orriols offered Casol the position of second on the list, but the former Junts MP rejected the proposal. However, Casol denies to ARA that she received a counteroffer: "I told them I wouldn't be on the lists without discussing places," she insists. However, she didn't communicate her decision not to be on the lists to the leadership until a few "days before" the deadline for submitting them. Orriols, in a tweet, asserted this Tuesday that Casol made being the head of the list a condition for joining Aliança. "He wanted to go; it was his condition for joining the Alliance. The way someone looks for a seat instead of serving the country does," he told X in response to Casol.

"It's a pro-independence party, but they have very xenophobic attitudes that put me off from the start because they have an obsession with Muslim immigration that I don't share," she says. When she was expelled from Junts, Casol claimed that one of the keys to the constant clash with the junts members was her "center-left" ideology compared to the group's "liberal" approach, and criticized some statements from within the party "linking immigration and crime." That same Friday, Casol criticized the campaign for expelling illegal immigrants and criminals with"deportation tickets"Now, it's also true that she herself admits that she "thought about" Alianza's offer.

Whether she had been the top of the list or number 2, Casol would have been a deputy because Aliança won one of the two seats for Lleida and Abad resigned from her position a few months later to lead the party from Lleida, and gave it to Rosa Maria Soberana, the only representative of the party with Sílvia Orrio. In any case, Casol ironically predicts that if she had accepted Aliança's offer, she would have been "expelled for the second time" from a party in a few months for her disagreements with the direction of a party that she does not call far-right, but rather "populist."

Casol is another of Aliança's failed signings after ARA announced that the party proposed the two visible heads of the National Front of Catalonia (FNC), whose party Sílvia Orriols dropped out of, leads the lists in Barcelona and Tarragona. Sergi Perramon, a councilor in Manresa, and Albert Camps, the mayor of La Masó, the only two towns where the Front is represented, rejected Aliança, which backed Lluís Areny and Aurora Fornos as candidates for Barcelona and Tarragona, respectively.