The mayoral candidate of Aliança Catalana who branded Sílvia Orriols' party as "fascist"

BarcelonaAliança Catalana presented eight new candidates for the municipal elections during the II Municipalist Convention held in Ripoll two Saturdays ago. One of them is Jaume Valls, who will be the mayoral candidate for Vilassar de Mar. An incorporation, to say the least, controversial, like other signings made by Sílvia Orriols' party, which never tires of repeating that they do not place “sanitary cordons for the past” on their candidates and that what prevails is that they share the party's project “here and now”. “People evolve,” she adds when the profile of some of the heads of lists is reproached to her.

A clear example of this “evolution” is Valls himself. When he was secretary of the ANC, he was one of the most belligerent members of the leadership against Aliança Catalana. At the gates of the last Parliament elections, the territorial branch of the Assembly in Sabadell organized a series of debates with pro-independence candidacies and included Aliança Catalana, with Lluís Areny and Oriol Ges, as representatives. Valls conveyed to the leadership his resounding opposition to the invitation of Aliança Catalana on that April 19th and began pulling strings to avoid it by speaking with other members of the secretariat. He also publicly denounced it on social media, labeling the members of Aliança Catalana as "fascists".

In conversation with ARA, Valls avoids getting into the criticisms he made of Aliança two years ago and asserts that the ANC "had always defended transversality" and that it was with the arrival of Lluís Llach at the head of the leadership, where he was elected treasurer, that the singer-songwriter "began to mark differences with Aliança, with the excuse of human rights and the “We want to welcome” campaign, a campaign that the entity carried out in 2015".

But this defense of the Assembly's transversality, Valls did not support when he was secretary, according to details from former secretaries who coincided with him during that mandate. Valls raised an outcry when a secretary replied that if the Assembly did not summon all the pro-independence parties it would be accused of not being transversal and of having lost its neutrality and that they had already received enough unfair criticism for the civic list. It had only been a month since the members had rejected by a hair to present a battle in Parliament with a civic list that was backed by the majority of the leadership headed by Dolors Feliu. Valls was part of the small group of secretaries opposed to the list who remained in the leadership because the majority left.

The conflict over the colloquium did not take long to erupt. On April 12, ERC and the CUP announced that they would not participate in the cycle if the Islamophobic party was invited. The next day, the ANC secretariat, after calling a meeting, urged not to organize events with parties in the campaign due to the risk of "instrumentalization" of the entity and to prevent the debate from "veering" to other issues that are not independence.

He advocated for removing the Sabadell leadership

Faced with what he considered an insufficient response from the leadership, Valls argued that more drastic measures needed to be taken. And he advocated for mobilizing members to hold an extraordinary assembly and remove the entire new executive committee of the ANC in Sabadell, which he believed was in the hands of people from Aliança Catalana and who were former members of Solidaritat and supporters of the civic list.

The local section of the Assembly, however, did not back down. That same day, the ANC of Sabadell called an assembly and unanimously approved maintaining the cycle to "give a voice to everyone who has something to say to the citizenry." Two days later, on April 15, the national secretariat dealt the final blow to the cycle by announcing it would not pay the room rental. Without a room, the ANC of Sabadell ended up suspending the cycle after denouncing that the national leadership had "clipped their wings." Aliança Catalana would end up holding its event in the street, amidst protests from anti-fascist groups.

Only two months later, Valls would be elected treasurer of the ANC leadership after the anti-civic list sector led by Lluís Llach prevailed in the four organizational positions with the goal of cleaning house of the old sector led by Feliu. He would end up resigning as treasurer for personal and professional reasons before finishing his term, but he remained on the ANC secretariat and is now the coordinator of the organization in Vilassar de Mar. A position he says he will leave if he enters the City Council.

He explains that he joined Aliança for two reasons: "Firstly because the parties that have disappointed, abandoned, and deceived us over these last 15 years have prioritized their own structure and their status quo above the improvement of Catalonia, and the second is that I prioritize the defense of Catalonia's values and its independence, and Aliança Catalana represents these values".