From New Force and Catalan Civil Society to Alliance

Barcelona“Not all candidates will be explicitly Catalan nationalists.” This is how Sílvia Orriols justified in an interview in May that there would be list leaders of Aliança Catalana in the municipal elections who would not be independentists. What was more difficult to imagine is that a former member of the far-right Fuerza Nueva of Blas Piñar, of the Comunión Tradicionalista Carlista, and later of Societat Civil Catalana would end up at Aliança Catalana.

left the party a month ago after the leadership threatened to expel herleft the party a month ago after the leadership threatened to expel her amid rumors of her move to Aliança.

Capelles' political trajectory is, to say the least, controversial. He began his career in Fuerza Nueva, alongside Josep Anglada, now leader of SOMI, who confirms that he had been in this Francoist party with him. With the dissolution of this formation, he joined the Comunión Tradicionalista Carlista in the nineties, a far-right party that still today claims the fascist coup of 1936 and the Civil War. He would be a candidate for this fascist party in the 1994 European elections. Subsequently, he would be part first of CDC and then of Duran i Lleida's UDC.

During the "Procés", specifically in 2015, he participated in the creation of the Manresa delegation – where he was born in 1966 – of Societat Civil Catalana, the main unionist entity in Catalonia, and was part of its leadership in Central Catalonia. In an interview with Regió 7 he stated that “independence was not the solution to the problem.” In conversation with ARA, Capelles assures that at Societat Civil he “defended the right to decide,” but refuses to comment on anything else about his political past.

In 2017, he also appeared in a report in El Mundo titled Volunteers against the 'procés', where he defended a negotiated referendum. "You can't break the law. The end never justifies the means," he stated in this article, which was published a few days before the referendum. Aliança Catalana, however, advocates for a unilateral declaration of independence.

Without going into evaluating his time in Francoist formations and referring only to his militancy in SCC, Orriols has once again relativized Capelles' past, as he has already done with other party members who have joined his project. "The members of Aliança Catalana have very diverse political origins and we do not reproach ourselves or create sanitary cordons for the past. We value the fact of sharing, here and now, an objective: a free, prosperous, safe, and Western Catalan State," he wrote on social media.

Campelles, in response to Orriols, has also downplayed his past. "It seems that it even bothers you that a person can reflect and evolve. It seems that if your origin is impure, there is no longer any option and you will be all your life without any option to show who you are now," he pointed out.

After the referendum, Capelles joined different independent lists without obtaining a councilor's seat. In 2019, he did so as number 2 with Vic Sentit Comú, a party that would eventually disappear after failing in the elections with a candidacy led by a former PSC councilor. In the last elections, he would try again with Xavier Farrés' list linked to the PDECat. Capelles and Font would break with the party due to their entry into Albert Castells' Junts government. "They left when we made a government pact because they didn't want to support it, they are visceral anti-Junts," concludes Farrés.