Ramón Cotarelo, the muse of Orriols who has passed through CUP, ERC, Junts and Aliança

BarcelonaProfessor emeritus of political science, writer and intellectual who has made radical ideological shifts, Ramón Cotarelo (Madrid, 1943) is now the muse of Aliança Catalana. He has spent a week dragging controversy following his gloss of the Diada in Ripoll, in which he encouraged waging war against Islam. Even the Ripoll City Council distanced itself from it, although its mayor and leader of Aliança, Sílvia Orriols, applauded the manifesto, lamenting, mind you, that "it was not the context nor the appropriate place," in her opinion.

Cotarelo supported the socialist governments of Felipe González, after having made a brief foray as a young man into the Communist Party of Spain. Also a columnist and regular commentator, in Catalonia he gained relevance during the height of the Procés, as he was an intellectual of the Spanish left who supported the right to self-determination. In 2015, in the elections presented as plebiscitary, he accepted to close the CUP list because it was a candidacy with an ideological line that was "clearly left-wing, assembly-based, republican, secular, socialist, environmentalist and feminist". The Electoral Board, however, prevented him from doing so by adhering to the electoral law, which states that candidates for regional elections must be registered in the autonomous community where they are held. Be that as it may, he starred in numerous CUP events, where David Fernández praised him.

In the 2017 elections, he already made a turn towards the pro-independence center-left and closed the ERC list in Barcelona. Two years later it seemed that he was closing the circle and was the last on the Junts list in Girona for the Spanish elections. From the CUP, to ERC and Junts during the Procés, he has progressively passed since then to be more and more of a scourge against "processism". In 2022 he already had a face-to-face with Orriols on 8tv, and gradually he began to develop an affection for her. Initially, he criticized her stigmatization of an entire collective such as Muslims. Orriols calls the writer "master", who moved to Catalonia in 2018 –where he enrolled his minor children– and who speaks Catalan fluently. "I was and am a Spanish nationalist as long as Spain accepts the freedom of the other nations," he said in 2023 on 8tv.

Some of those who knew him in the political circles through which he passed in the Principality label him a "political transvestite" and point out that his ideological confusion was already seen early on.