"Jaume Y wishes you a happy Ramadan!": the unofficial chat of Aliança Catalana

BarcelonaAfter entering the Catalan Parliament and with an eye on the municipal elections, Aliança Catalana has been creating regional executive committees. All of them have chat groups with the leaders and members of the region. There, they discuss current political events and organize the weekend information booths. The far-right pro-independence party also has an unofficial one.

Its administrators are the party's core, the hard core of the organization, with Sílvia Orriols, Oriol Gès, and Jordi Aragonès at the helm, along with about a dozen other prominent party members. The chat group, which brings together around 150 members or supporters, is called Nationalist Action. It is the only group, apart from the one the executive committee has on Signal, where all the party's heavyweights are present.

This chat is rife with xenophobia, especially against Muslims, but also against Spaniards, and it incites violence against the CUP, which has tried to boycott some of the stalls that Aliança has set up throughout the region in recent months.

This is evident in the images obtained by ARA, such as the Ramadan "greeting" featuring King James I killing Muslims. Others directly insult Islam, link Muslim immigration to crime, lumping it all together, or deny the Catalan identity of citizens of Arab origin living in our country. All of this is accompanied by slogans like "Catalan Catalonia" or "Catalonia, neither Spanish nor Muslim," which were already heard during the last Diada (Catalan National Day), when Aliança launched its own blog for the first time.

Despite the xenophobic nature of some of the messages, the executive members did not ask for them to be removed, nor did they warn that they do not conform to their ethical principles.

Another image from the chat points to ERC deputy Najat Driouech, with whom Orriols has clashed several times during this legislature and whom she accused of "normalizing misogyny and Islamic fundamentalism" by wearing a veil. These accusations have led the Catalan Parliament to open proceedings to determine whether the leader of Aliança Catalana violated the code of conduct. at the request of the Republicans.

"I support a moratorium on immigration, but in this chat, hatred of immigrants is professed," denounces an activist who was expelled from the group for questioning these discourses and who has since resigned from the party. Silence was the administrators' response to his complaints about the xenophobic views of some participants. This continued even when some users revived proposals such as planting mines on the borders, put forward by the Greek neo-Nazi party Alba Daurada, which was outlawed in 2020 for being considered a criminal organization.

There are also messages with images denigrating Spaniards with xenophobic insults or calls to kill them.

Shots fired at the CUP

This activist was kicked out of the chat when he protested an image of a party member shooting at a CUP poster as a target. "There was no sign of disapproval; they let all these comments slide, and that was a turning point," he says.

When asked by ARA, the party leadership declined to comment on this controversial chat. But these xenophobic and violent messages also appear in the party's regional Telegram chats. However, only Oriol Gès or, by default, Lluís Areny participates in these chats, not the entire leadership. This is confirmed by another member who was given the option to leave after criticizing the party for supporting European far-right groups like the AFD and Reagrupament Nacional, which are already associated with Vox, and especially for the hate speech directed at Muslims.

"It's pure and simple racism. It's one thing to argue that immigration needs to be managed, and another to say that all immigrants are scum or criminals when many of our ancestors also had to leave in 1939," denounces this member who left the group and deactivated his membership. "I had constant clashes with members who were spouting this nonsense, but everyone was ganging up on me. A project that could have been exciting has been turned into an extremist party," he declares.

He himself asked the regional leadership to warn users, citing the bylaws, but the top leaders responded that it was freedom of expression. "Freedom of expression is one thing, and extremist propaganda is another," this former member argues, revealing that many others think the same, but have stayed and remained silent because right now "Alianza is a job placement agency."