From Fuerza Nueva and Catalan Civil Society to Alliance
Sílvia Orriols' party signs an agreement with a new party from Vic led by a former Francoist militant
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 Blas Piñar's far-right Fuerza Nueva, of the Comunión Tradicionalista Carlista and later of Societat Civil Catalana would end up in 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 following rumors of her move to Aliança.
Capelles' political career is, to say the least, controversial. He began his journey 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 Process, specifically in 2015, he participated in the creation of the Manresa delegation – where he was born – 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 within Societat Civil Catalana he "defended the right to decide", but refuses to comment further on his political past. In 2017 he also appeared in a report in El Mundo titled «Volunteers against the ‘procés’», where he advocated for a negotiated referendum. "You cannot break the law. The end never justifies the means”, he stated in this article, which was published a few days before the referendum.
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 in a candidacy led by a former PSC councilor. Four years ago, in the last municipal 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 the Junts government led by Albert Castells. "They left when we made a government pact because they did not want to support it, they are visceral anti-Junts," concludes Farrés.