The unease in the historic neighborhoods threatens a resurgence of the far-right in Tortosa

This report is part of the Dossier: the transversal axis of the extreme right. Throughout the week we will publish various topics that help to understand the keys to the rise of this phenomenon and we will map the situation in various Catalan capitals.Sant Blai street has historically been one of the most commercial in Tortosa and illustrates well the changes the city has undergone in recent years. Approximately 36,000 people live in the capital of Baix Ebre, 23.5% of whom are of foreign origin. Many of the immigrants work in the fields or run small businesses in the city. This is the case of Oman, who opened a restaurant on Sant Blai street, the Luxury Rif, a year and a half ago. It is flanked by a phone booth, on one side, and a kebab shop, a few meters away. A neighbor enters and asks him if he minds if he asks for something to eat. Oman, who is in the middle of Ramadan when we do this report, tells him no. "We are here chipping away at it," he explains about the business, which serves traditional Moroccan food. Moroccans are the foreign population group with the most weight in the region: they represent 30% of foreigners, according to data from Idescat.

"We have many foreign people and the local businesses have closed. The people who opened these businesses have every right to, but in the old town, for example, they have abandoned us. We need it to be an attractive place again," explains the president of the neighborhood association of this area of the municipality, Tomàs Serrato, to ARA. Tula Llorach, from the Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Tortosa, agrees, warning that the historic center has suffered 30 years of degradation, with cleaning problems and boarded-up buildings to prevent squatting. Long-time residents are leaving for more affluent areas of the surroundings, while newcomers with fewer resources are settling in neighborhoods like Santa Clara or Remolins. These neighborhoods look with hope at the neighborhood plan to regenerate streets and buildings that are falling apart.

The City Council denies coexistence problems and, beyond isolated conflicts, emphasizes the need for education to normalize diversity. The mayor, Mar Lleixà (ERC), receives ARA at the consistory shortly after taking over the mayoral sash from the then-mayor, Jordi Jordà (Comuns), with whom the term has been shared. Lleixà highlights social initiatives launched by her government in mental health and education, as well as a specific department on Catalan to prevent the decline in its use in one of the most Catalan-speaking areas of the Principality. "Just as many people from Tortosa have relatives who emigrated to Switzerland, here there are people who come to find a better life," she argues. She does not deny the degradation of some areas, but warns that it is not something that can be solved in a couple of years. Changes are already underway in the cleaning contract to remedy this.

Social initiatives like the Panxampla community center or the Atzavara reception entity have long been working with newcomers and residents on joint projects, hand in hand with a social intervention and cultural mediation project called "community process" that the City Council launched in 2010 with the la Caixa Foundation. One of the main problems they have to face, explains Guillem, from the center, is the segregation that occurs in the city, with two schools of high complexity where the children of immigrants do not fully mix with those of the city.

Looking back

The situation reminds some of what was experienced in the early 2010s, when the historic mayor of Tortosa, Ferran Bel, took the bull by the horns and began to implement drastic measures to reduce fraudulent registrations in the city. The former mayor, now retired from politics, explains to ARA that the situation was dramatic, with buses of people in irregular situations being left in Tortosa by mafias. In three years, he deregistered more than 4,000 registered residents by tightening registration criteria, a case that ended up on the ombudsman's desk.

The unrest in the historic neighborhoods is the perfect breeding ground for the far-right to reappear, which already set foot there in 2011 with a councilor from Plataforma per Catalunya. Bel applied a cordon sanitaire to it: he convinced the opposition not to answer his questions or vote on his proposals, a strategy that bore fruit when, in the following term, they disappeared from the council. However, the left-wing forces in Tortosa have a different reading of this story: if the far-right disappeared from the city and has not reappeared – even though Aliança already has a group there – it is because Junts per Tortosa is already adopting a similar discourse. The former mayor and current leader of the opposition, Meritxell Roigé, defends herself by saying that one only needs to walk the streets to see that there is a problem with immigration: "There is a feeling that those who have just arrived are getting ahead of the neighbors. This is fueling racism in the city and must be stopped," she emphasizes.

The portrait that the left-wing parties paint of Tortosa is that of a conservative city, where there has always been a certain organized activism, but a minority one. Tortosa's "caciquismo" is also a recurring criticism among the city's progressive sectors, who have seen in the government of ERC and Comuns the opportunity to wrest the city's future from the hands of "the usual suspects," as Alberich defines it. The debate surrounding the Francoist monument in Tortosa, they maintain, also illustrates this situation. Esther Baiges, from the Commission for the removal of Francoist symbols, attributes the reluctance of many Tortosa residents to get rid of it to the "bad memory" of a city that suffered very harsh repression and a difficult post-war period. "There is also the feeling that outsiders should not come and tell the people of Tortosa what to do. Many times we have felt like the backyard of Catalonia," she concludes.