Sílvia Orriols amends Jordi Pujol: "There are many people who live and work here and will never be Catalan"

Barcelona"There are many people who live and work here and will never be Catalan." This is how forceful Sílvia Orriols was, in a conference at Fòrum Europa Tribuna Catalunya, in mid-February. She was referring explicitly to the Muslim community in our country, because she considers their integration into Catalan society to be impossible. It was not the first time that the leader of Aliança Catalana, a declared Islamophobe, had made such a statement. It is part of a recurrent discourse that she has expressed since she arrived at the Ripoll Town Council in 2019. This stance clashes with the definition of Catalan identity traditionally defended by Catalanism. It is a total amendment to one of the most famous phrases of former president Jordi Pujol: "He is Catalan who lives and works in Catalonia and wants to be." During his long tenure, the leader of Convergència never tired of repeating this idea, a result of the debate about who was Catalan with the arrival between 1950 and 1970 of thousands of immigrants from various parts of Spain. Pujol defended civic integration, not integration by origin, under the premise that being Catalan did not depend on being born in Catalonia, but on wanting to be part of the country. He also sought to avoid social division for fear of creating two separate communities: that oforiginal Catalans and that of immigrants. And finally, with the desire for Catalanism to broaden its social base.

Pujol's approach had already been put on the table by historian Josep Benet, publicly coining, for the first time, the expression "one single people." A statement that the PSUC, a party to which Benet would be linked, would eventually adopt. It was on March 24, 1968, in Badalona, on the centenary of Pompeu Fabra. And he did so in response to the essay "Catalanism and Bourgeois Revolution", by Jordi Solé Tura, who labeled Catalanism as bourgeois and considered that it could not be popular or left-wing.

That Catalonia had six million inhabitants and now has eight, and one in four Catalans was born abroad. The newcomers come from different countries around the world, many of them Muslim. And in a context where public services are at their limit in some cities and people's material lives are worsening, the far-right resorts to identity politics to blame newcomers for hoarding all resources and for the dissolution of the nation or the marginalization of the language.

Aliança Catalana makes distinctions among newcomersIn this scenario, Aliança Catalana's approach is that Catalan identity does not depend solely on residing in a place or having papers, but on sharing culture, language, and values, and that there are groups who "do not want or cannot" integrate because their values are "incompatible" with those of the West. In fact, Orriols, in a recent plenary session in Parliament, spoke of one single people, obviously including only Spanish immigration. "When we were young, we used to fight in the street shouting 'xarnegos' and polacos'. Today, those we used to fight with vote for us," she assured, under the premise that everyone seeks "to guarantee a Catalan, safe, prosperous, and Western future" for their children. Thus, members of the party question whether people born here, like the Barça footballer Lamine Yamal, are Catalan.

The party's press officer, Eduard Berraondo, recently criticized that they are reproached for not considering many people who live and work in Catalonia as Catalan. He argued that to be Catalan, "one must speak the language, the minimum requirement, or love and know the traditions and demonstrate one's Catalan identity," ignoring that in this equation, perhaps many more people would not fit, in addition to the latest arrivals.

This identity or ethno-cultural vision of the nation defended by the pro-independence far-right is not shared by political Catalanism, which has always championed integration. Junts continues to defend Pujol's postulates, but emphasizes the full phrase the former president used because it considers that it has been distorted. "Pujol said that he is Catalan who lives and works in Catalonia and has the will to be. Not just half the phrase, and obviously we agree," emphasize sources from the post-convergence party, which speaks of rights and also duties of newcomers, and which calls for the management of immigration policies.

From Esquerra, they also defend that he is Catalan who wants to be "regardless of where he was born, the language he speaks, who he prays to, how he loves, and even where he lives." In this regard, the Republicans are convinced that surely "there are people who do not want to be Catalan," but that for this reason "one does not have to be born outside of Catalonia." Therefore, Oriol Junqueras' party concludes that "Catalonia is a national project that is neither essentialist nor ethnic, designed not only for nationalists but also for nationals, that is, everyone who freely wants to be part of it." Esquerra also emphasizes the concept of double identity: "Those who come from other places do not need to abandon their language, their culture, to also be Catalan and acquire a new language and a new culture: Catalan."

The CUP does not understand Catalan identity as a card that someone can distribute or as a label that can be delimited by criteria of origin: "Asking who is or is not Catalan starts from a mistaken premise. Who decides what it means to be 'from here'? Are we talking about surnames? If we accepted these types of criteria, practically no one could consider themselves autochthonous in Catalonia." "Catalan identity is not built from origin, but from the will to be part of a community and from participation in its collective project," add the anti-capitalists, who deplore talking about "autochthonous" and "people from outside" to avoid "fragmenting and confronting society."

Vox, with Aliança CatalanaFrom the ranks of the PSC, Ferran Pedret, president of the parliamentary group, defends that "the expression 'we are and will be one single people' is the best tradition of political Catalanism" because "it builds a shared identity and strengthens the social fabric of the country." "Whoever wants to divide the citizens of Catalonia by their appearance, beliefs, origin, or language can count on us fighting them democratically to the last consequences," adds the deputy, who advocates for "an open, diverse, and plural society and not a monolithic one." Comuns also embrace the quotes from Pujol and Benet, and consider them "perfectly valid today." Faced with the rise of the far-right, Jèssica Albiach's party warns that "the real dilemma that Catalonia faces as a nation is not immigration yes or no, but building an inclusive and diverse society, with full equality of rights and duties, or a segregated society."

Vox, on the other hand, aligns with Aliança Catalana, but only with the exclusion of Muslim immigration. It considers that "any Spaniard who is born or lives in Catalonia and who loves it and feels it as their small homeland" is Catalan. And it understands Catalan identity as "the concrete cultural expression of Hispanity that occurs in Catalonia and that today is threatened both by a separatism that distorts this historical and cultural reality and by a policy of open borders that erases our identity and way of life." The PP disagrees with the need to feel part of the collective: "He is Catalan who lives or works in Catalonia, but then there are other Catalans who neither live nor work in Catalonia and are also Catalan like those born here, regardless of their will to be so, by virtue of being Spanish."