Saint Muriel Casals to raise independence and combat Sílvia Orriols

Prada of ConflentAfter the Process and the secessionist division of recent years, recovery and how to move forward in the future have been the most repeated themes. This Tuesday, at the Catalan Summer University in Prada, a tribute was paid to the former president of Òmnium, Muriel Casals, ten years after her death. The current president of the entity, Xavier Antich, the president of the Parliament, Josep Rull, and the former president of the Parliament and of the ANC, Carme Forcadell, have performed a kind of "beatification" of Casals' figure and have prescribed her as a remedy to "raise secessionism", regain unity, and combat the "hatred" of the far-right party Aliança Catalana, led by Sílvia Orriols.

Secessionism is currently in low spirits and Aliança is a permanent ghost that threatens to even be the leading secessionist party in the country according to some polls. Despite this, vetoing the party and its hateful discourse is necessary for independence to be possible at some point, according to the participants of the round table. Before the event, Rull had already warned that "the ethnicist approach makes the nation and independence unviable" and that it is necessary to fight against an ideology "based on populism and dehumanization," in allusion to Aliança's disposition. Likewise, Antich appealed to "broad consensus" to guarantee "social cohesion, "threatened by the State" and by "forces that seek to turn Catalan identity into a national minority" within the country from "xenophobic positions that seek to exclude from within Catalan identity." For this reason, Forcadell insisted so much on unity, which she says she is working to rebuild, although she later threw a reproach at the parties: "We must achieve independence from civil society and we must drag the political parties along, because I don't see them being very keen on independence," she stated.

For Casals, "since she remains frozen in 2016" – the best years of secessionism, according to Antich – "it would be easy to remember her as an exercise in nostalgia and beatification." In fact, Antich reached a conclusion that the rest of the table instantly shared: "Saint Muriel and that's it, our secular saint." It was indeed an effervescent moment: "There were no toxic elements because they had no space, there were no elements for disappointment because everything was hope," he asserted, referring to the period before 2017, in which Casals was a protagonist, among others.

And, speaking of Casals, the topic of "the revolt of smiles" had to be addressed with an intervention by Rull, who recalled when "optimism was contagious": "Some speak of [the revolution of smiles] mockingly... Smiling doesn't mean being fainthearted," he said. And he once again fired at Orriols, without naming her: "She suggests giving up smiling and having a brutal attitude." Instead, he recounted that "what bothers" the Supreme Court the most is "the smile" of those who were imprisoned for October 1st.

Forcadell, who still remembers the tandem with Casals and the "trio" with Josep Maria Vila d'Abadal, former president of the Association of Municipalities for Independence, vindicated Junts pel Sí: "It was possible thanks to Òmnium and the ANC; the proof is that nothing more has been done." And she asked to recover this civil society force to achieve unity with the objective of independence: "We should pay more attention to Muriel," she said. But she embraced realism: "Muriel was very clear that we have to achieve independence ourselves, that no one will help us. It would have been important to keep that in mind in 2017 because surely the others didn't have it so clear." That is to say, the world will not look at us.

"One single people"

But Orriols continued to walk around the room, even though neither she nor any representative of Aliança was present at this sovereignist gathering in Northern Catalonia. According to the President of the Parliament, "there would be no Catalan nation without the idea of Catalonia, one people" with more than 70% of the population "born outside Catalonia or with one parent born outside". "If the approach had been ethnicist, [the Process] could not have happened," he warned, emphasizing that "Muriel Casals would never have endorsed a discourse that does not take people into account". Rull reiterated the message to his party to maintain the veto and the fight against Aliança, while some former Convergència leaders like David Madí are asking to make pacts with them and, at the local level, several representatives do not rule out pacts in the future, as reported by ARA.

The "vocation for majorities" and working "for the whole country" are more necessary than ever, according to the president of Òmnium, without xenophobic "barbarities" and weaving "efforts to unite", as Casals did. "Muriel had an extraordinary capacity to listen, but when she was convinced of something, she did it". They have all invoked Saint Muriel, three days after her name day, Saint Mary's Day, was celebrated.