A pre-candidate for Barça in 2021, a far-right mayoral candidate in Sant Cugat

BarcelonaNationalist Advance, the party backing councilor Sergi Perramon in Manresa for the upcoming municipal elections, is beginning to expand its reach to other towns. It has already arrived in Sant Cugat del Vallès, where Lluís Fernández Alà, a former FC Barcelona presidential candidate in the 2021 elections, will be the party's mayoral candidate. In the last municipal elections, the businessman, like Perramon himself, ran under the banner of the National Front of Catalonia (FNC). And while he failed to secure the necessary endorsements from club members to continue his presidential campaign, he also struggled in the Sant Cugat local elections, garnering only 206 votes (0.5%) and finishing second to last.

These results contrast sharply with those achieved by Perramon in the capital of Bages, where the Front won two council seats with 1,618 votes (6.4%), obtained through a highly critical discourse on immigration policy but without using Muslims as scapegoats, unlike Aliança Catalana. Perramon, who left the Front a year after the elections due to disagreements with the leadership, He presented the new party at the end of the year with the aim of uniting the center-right spaceShunning party labels and remaining unbranded, Perramon aims to forge a grand coalition with Junts and the PDECat, but one that will not involve any absorption. This same objective, Perramon explains, is intended for Sant Cugat, where in 2023 four lists from this center-right or pro-independence space ran without securing seats. These included Independents Sant Cugat, a candidacy backed by the ANC that narrowly missed winning a council seat, as well as the PDECat and Convergents. "The Manresa model can be adapted to the reality of Sant Cugat, where the vote was also fragmented," the Manresa councilor points out. In fact, Jordi Ysamat, Convergents' number two candidate in 2023, will now be part of the Avance Santcugatenc list. Fernández Alá is no newcomer to politics. A member of Unió Democràtica de Catalunya, he ran in the 2011 Sant Cugat municipal elections on the Convergència i Unió (CiU) ticket. He was number 16 out of 25 on the list and narrowly missed being elected, as the list headed by Mercè Conesa swept the elections, winning 15 council seats. As a member of Unió, he aligned himself with the party's pro-independence wing and eventually left the party. In 2018, he reappeared as a pre-candidate for mayor of Sant Cugat with Demòcrates de Catalunya, the pro-independence party that emerged from Unió's implosion in the summer of 2015, but ultimately did not field a candidate, wanting to avoid splitting the pro-independence vote in this stronghold of CiU and now Junts, which won outright.