Where is the Catalan Alliance growing?

For many pro-independence parties, voting for the Catalan Alliance is becoming a vote of punishment against the other pro-independence parties for the paralysis of the Process, but Silvia Orriols's party is also attracting voters who are not pro-independence, surely due to its rhetoric against Muslim immigration. This is evident in the latest published polls. In other words, the Alliance has a nationalist vote but is also beginning to broaden its spectrum. Where is it growing?

The latest barometer from the Center for Opinion Studies (CEO), published in July, showed that the Alliance is the third of the four pro-independence parties in Parliament with the most voters against independence, with 17% opposed and 7% who don't know or do not, compared to 2% and 8% respectively. It is also the party with the most voters who believe Catalonia should remain an autonomous community, with 14%. In the previous presidential election in April, Alianza was the party least supportive of independence, with only 71% of voters supporting independent statehood.

And, at the beginning of the year, the Institute of Political and Social Sciences (ICPS) went even further, placing those opposed to independence at 63.6%. The World The Spanish Nationalist Party (Alianza Nacional) published a poll this week that found that up to 47.7% of its voters would oppose independence, compared to 50.8% who would opt for breaking away from Spain. Be that as it may, then, despite the divergence in percentages, the polling trend is that Alianza is gaining ground among non-sovereignty supporters.

Junts, the main source of votes for the Catalan Alliance, but not only

The March 12 elections, which allowed Aliança to gain a foothold in Parliament, highlighted the shift in votes from Junts to the far-right party. Half of the 118,000 votes that the xenophobic candidate received came from Carles Puigdemont's party. Or, in other words, more than 10% of its 2021 voters switched to Aliança. The far-right party also drew on blank or spoiled votes (14,000) and former abstentionists (12,000), likely from disenchanted pro-independence groups. Eleven thousand former ERC voters, 4,000 from the CUP and the National Front of Catalonia, and 3,000 from the PDECat (Democratic Left) made up the bulk of the voters.

Currently, the trend is the same, according to the polls. According to the survey published this Sunday by La Vanguardia, Aliança Catalana would go from 2 to 19 deputies and would be in a position to challenge Junts i Esquerra for the second largest force in the country, which would remain at 21. In fact, a good part of the seats that Sílvia Orriols' party would obtain would come, precisely, from Carles Puigdemont's party. Its main base of voters comes from Junts, but not only: it is also managing to penetrate the PP and Vox, as well as ERC and the CUP. In the latest CEO survey – where Alianza grew from 2 to 10-11 seats– Juntos remains the leading force from which Alianza can draw votes, with 8%, but only slightly ahead of the PP (7%) and Vox (5%), which are the other parties that would see the most votes transferred to the far-right pro-independence movement if elections were held now. In fact, one of the new findings of this poll is the confirmation of possible voter trafficking between the Catalan Alliance and Vox depending on the elections.

The survey ofThe World It also highlighted that the far-right pro-independence party would largely absorb support from Junts (17.4%) and ERC (9.9%)—although the CEO barometer doesn't predict a flight of Republican voters—but, in third place, placed Vox, with 6.6%, two points behind. It would also benefit from a significant transfer of non-independence votes from Comuns (4.3%), the PSC (3.7%), and the PP (2%). The shift of Vox's electorate toward Aliança, motivated by Orriols's emergence in the Parliament, is evident when its voters are asked which leader they prefer to be president of the Generalitat. Ten percent of its voters opt for the mayor of Ripoll, while the number of voters for the other parties ranges between a ridiculous 0% and 2% support. And in the La Vanguardia survey, Orriols is the leader who inspires the most sympathy among PP and Vox voters. One in three approves of the work the mayor of Ripoll is doing in Parliament. These figures are very similar to those given to her own Vox leader, Ignacio Garriga.

Lleida, the stone in the shoe

The excitement generated by Orriols' new political project has translated into a significant presence in the region, forged after securing representation in Parliament. Since then, the party has been busy creating regional committees with an eye toward the municipal elections, where it hopes to establish itself in the country's major cities and win a mayoralty beyond its stronghold of Ripoll. The Catalan Alliance declined to comment to ARA regarding its regional committees, but, according to data published on its website, it has managed to establish committees in all of Barcelona's counties, with the exception of Berguedà, which is a matter of days away, according to local sources, Lluçanès, and Moianès. The same applies to Tarragona, with the exception of Terra Alta and Ribera d'Ebre, and in Girona, only the formation of the Cerdanya core is pending.

It is precisely in the Pyrenees where there are more problems in articulating executives as a result of the party's first territorial crisisThe first members of the Catalan Alliance in the Pyrenees wanted to establish a leadership and called a congress for late 2024, which never took place. The problem is that they wanted to establish themselves as a veguería (a small group of villages), even though the party's statutes only provide for organization by region. The dispute between the leadership and this core group ended with the expulsion of two of its leaders and the departure of other supporters: therefore, for now, the party still has no executive committees in all of Lleida's Pyrenean regions.

The Lleida district is a thorn in the side of the Catalan Alliance because it only has the Segrià and Pla d'Urgell core groups, but still lacks them in Noguera, Urgell, Les Garrigues, or Segarra. It is precisely from this last region that the former mayor of Ribera de Ondara was from, who resigned from his position as councillor after the far-right party disassociated itself from him due to having made homophobic statements on social media,in which he called the LGBTI community a "cancer"Puig was one of Aliança's strongmen in Lleida, and his departure caused a stir in the region.