Gerard Juny resigned this week as a militant of Aliança and head of communication in La Selva. "Aliança is too far left for me and too complexed," he stated, while admitting he would continue to vote for them because there was "nothing else." The young man from Girona made this decision after the leadership expelled the candidate in Figueres, Arnau Liesa, for maintaining a romantic relationship with a sixteen-year-old former student.

After some turbulent recent times with internal crises and opposing sectors, ERC experienced this Monday the birth of a new organization that does not seek to take control of the party, but rather to strengthen it and make it more attractive to sectors that have not yet approached it. This is the challenge undertaken by ERC deputies in the Parliament and Congress, Carles Campuzano and Francesc-Marc Álvaro, who have presented Esquerra Democràtica, an association affiliated with the republican formation, whose objective is to attract the centrist sovereignist vote.

The judge investigating actress Elisa Mouliaá for Íñigo Errejón's lawsuit for alleged slander ordered her arrest on Wednesday after she failed to appear for the third time. If her absence was surprising, even more so was the response of her new lawyer. "I have not recommended that she appear or not appear, because my ego is at shoe level and not in the clouds, and I am not the smart lawyer who arrives third and brainwashes her client to tell her that everything she has done before is wrong and that the previous lawyers are worse than me".

Aliança Catalana already has a candidate in Barcelona. He is "a man and he is known", as the party leader, Sílvia Orriols, said in February, but he is not the media personality she was presumably referring to, the publicist Lluís Carrasco. The mayoral candidate in the Catalan capital is Jordi Aragonès (Pineda de Mar, 1993), who presented his candidacy this afternoon at El Born Cultural Centre, with about 200 militants from all over the country. The Islamophobic formation had to resort to plan B after offers to Carrasco himself, Sandro Rosell, Jaume Giró and, as a last resort, Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas failed.

“Not all candidates will be explicitly Catalan nationalists.” This is how Sílvia Orriols justified in an interview in May that there would be list leaders of Aliança Catalana in the municipal elections who would not be independentists. What was more difficult to imagine is that a former member of the far-right Fuerza Nueva of Blas Piñar, of the Comunión Tradicionalista Carlista, and later of Societat Civil Catalana would end up at Aliança Catalana.

Zapatero's jewels have been making headlines for days and are part of a new separate case within the Plus Ultra case at the National Court. But the necklaces and earrings valued at 1.3 million euros that the former Spanish president received and which come from "inheritances and gifts", according to his spokesperson, have once again put a controversial issue at the center of the debate: why can't we know the gifts that Spanish presidents receive while in office? For example, the current head of the executive, Pedro Sánchez, still has not revealed the gifts he has received since his arrival at Moncloa.

More than a hundred entities and more than 50 personalities from culture and communication presented this Wednesday a manifesto in support of Roger Español, the activist from whom the National Police took an eye during the referendum of October 1st. The manifesto arrives on the eve of the trial that will seat the four agents involved in the operation in the dock, who are the only ones not amnestied out of the 162 indicted police officers.

The fragmentation of the convergent space led to Junts and the new PDECat brand, Ara Pacte Local, running separately in the 2023 elections. The division penalized both formations in Mollerussa, where they tied with 4 councilors each, even though the party then led by Marc Solsona came first by a difference of 11 votes. This gave the historic mayor room to lead negotiations to form a government. The executive was initially agreed with the PSC, which had 2 councilors, but after just over a year, the four Junts councilors also decided to join the municipal government, granting him a comfortable absolute majority.

The government committee of Aliança Catalana is made up of six people: Sílvia Orriols, Oriol Gès, Jordi Aragonès, Lluís Areny, Aurora Fornos and Franc Massaneda. From this hard core of the party, the candidate for Barcelona in the municipal elections will most likely emerge. Areny is the most likely to be the mayoral candidate in the Catalan capital, according to what ARA has learned, although Aragonès could also be. "Right now there is an 80% chance that Areny will be the candidate," say sources from the formation.

The new cases of alleged corruption surrounding the PSOE have brought to the fore more strongly than ever a possible motion of no confidence against Pedro Sánchez. At the municipal level, however, motions do not necessarily have to be linked to corrupt schemes. Political and, above all, personal disagreements also end up ousting mayors. This is what has happened in Pont de Molins, a small town of less than 600 inhabitants in L'Alt Empordà. But here, the trigger for the change in mayorship, however hard to believe, has been a yoga class.

Aliança Catalana has been inaugurating headquarters in recent months in different cities in the country such as Lleida, Tàrrega or Valls with an eye on the upcoming municipal elections. Now, however, Sílvia Orriols's formation will lose one. Specifically in Berga. The eviction will occur in a month's time and comes just after the leader of the Islamophobic formation was heckled a week ago at La Patum with slogans such as "Fascists out of La Patum!" or "Jump, jump, jump, fascist whoever doesn't jump!"

Aliança Catalana formally only has a presence in the town councils of Ripoll and Manlleu, after losing Ribera d'Ondara, although in some municipalities it has attracted defecting councilors. Many of them do not hide it and arrive at the plenary sessions with the organization's folders. Local representatives of the party also carry them in towns where they do not have representation and where they plan to fight in next year's municipal elections. "It is about campaigning before the elections," admits a party member. This pre-campaign is not done haphazardly. The plenary sessions are prepared even though Aliança does not have a voice there.

"We have been working for many, many years for the Patum to be a success, and above all an example of harmony, of sharing, of friendship and of joy, and the City Council's plea is that this continues to be so." In this way, the mayor of Berga, Ivan Sànchez, called on Wednesday to maintain the complicity of recent years at the start of the festival. This festive atmosphere has soured this Thursday, just one day later, due to the presence of Sílvia Orriols on the balcony of the City Council. The president of Aliança Catalana was met with an unprecedented booing at the first jump of the full Patum, in which the 'guita' carried the anti-fascist flag. Hundreds of people, some with whistles, have heckled the also mayoress of Ripoll with shouts such as "Out with fascists from the Patum!" or "Jump, jump, jump, fascist whoever doesn't vote!".

The President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, will not have to appear at this week's plenary session to explain the PSOE scandals because ERC backed down and allied with Comuns to vote against his appearance on Tuesday. However, the head of the executive was not saved from the opposition's attacks and his partners' reproaches this Wednesday in a more than tense session to control the Government.

Two years have already passed since the final approval of the amnesty law, but the hottest part is still to come. For example, it has only been recognized in just over half (52%) of the cases of activists where it should have been applied, according to data provided by Alerta Solidària. 181 protesters have benefited from it, and also 64 pro-independence political officials. In total, 245 people have had their criminal liability extinguished, but there are 257 who are still pending, either because they have been rejected outright or because the courts have not yet ruled. The basic difference arises when compared to the police officers who were indicted: only 4 out of 162 have been denied amnesty.

Josep Rull and Jordi Turull are two of Junts' strongmen. Former political prisoners, the first is president of the Parliament, the country's second institution, and the second is the party's general secretary, second only to president Carles Puigdemont in the hierarchy of Junts members. To the Rull-Turull duo, Borrull is now added, in a wordplay in the form of a paronomasia, at least, curious. Specifically, Toni Borrull, Junts' candidate in Matadepera. He could be the future mayor of this Vallesà municipality for the next four years. And all three have played a key role in the reunification of the post-convergence space after losing the previous elections in a town where they had governed since 2007.

The mayor of Santa Susanna, Joan Campolier, has once again justified the celebration of the neo-Nazi festival Chaos in the Sun, which starts this Friday and runs until tomorrow, on a private estate. In an interview with El matí de Catalunya Ràdio, the councilor mayor has defended that in the previous three editions there have been no incidents. "It has been held for three years and there have been no problems, it has gone unnoticed and the organizers have respected the schedule," he said. Marc Buch, the mayor of Calella, where most attendees sleep, did reveal in conversation with ARA that "two years ago there was a fight between them and last night there was another one at the party they are holding in a local nightclub."

"Out of institutional respect, I remind you that the natural language is Catalan and, if you do not know it, I inform you that there are places available at the adult school. If you wish, I can give you an enrollment form." In this way, the mayor of Ripoll, Sílvia Orriols, reprimanded the new councilor of the PSC, Jorge Iglesias, who was debuting in the plenary session yesterday, for making his speech in Spanish. In a subsequent intervention, Morillo responded that he would do "the possible to learn Catalan", but asked the leader of Aliança Catalana that she "do the possible to carry out social actions". It all began when Iglesias, a retiree born in Montevideo and linked to the Ripollès region, intervened in the swearing-in and assured that he would carry out his activity "with the corresponding loyalty". The other socialist councilor, Paco Morillo, a resident of Ripoll, did not want to intervene in his debut as a councilor.

On February 5, 2015, Lluís Monge was the only socialist councilor accompanying the former mayor of Sabadell, Manuel Bustos, to the courts. The former mayor had to testify in the case of watches allegedly gifted to members of the Federation of Municipalities of Catalonia (FMC) when he presided over the entity, as part of the Mercuri case. Upon leaving, Monge also acted as Bustos' spokesperson to deny that the money came from training courses and to justify the institutional gifts. That was one of the pieces of a proceeding that ended inconvicting Bustos to three years in prison in 2022.

4,079,799.04 euros. This is the amount that Spanish former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero would have taken in five years, from 2020 to 2025, according to the UDEF report, for intervening in the rescue of the airline Plus Ultra and other companies. The receipt of these incomes is one of the two key affidavits that have served as the basis for Judge José Luis Calama to indict, for the first time since the return to democracy, a former head of government.