The emergence of Aliança Catalana (AC) in Parliament and the growth predicted by demography have led Junts to move to try to stem the vote leakage that polls foresee towards Sílvia Orriols' party. And it has done so mainly on immigration matters. Although Carles Puigdemont's formation has not yet presented its immigration plan —it has been delayed without any public explanation, but it coincides with the fact that a part of the party considers that the focus should not be placed on Aliança's framework—, it has made moves both in Parliament and in Congress, as well as in municipalities. What steps has it taken?

Another former Junts leader joins Aliança Catalana. And not just anyone. Oriol Giralt, the former head of Junts' list in Sant Andreu de Llavaneres in both 2023 and 2019, will be the candidate for Sílvia Orriols' party in the Maresme town. Giralt is not known for his political career, but for being the FC Barcelona member who in 2008 promoted a motion of no confidence against Joan Laporta.

The pro-independence organizations have presented this Tuesday the demonstration for the Diada of 2026, which will once again be decentralized as in recent years with demonstrations in Barcelona, Girona, and Amposta. In the Catalan capital, one column formed by the bulk of the population will leave from Casanova street with Gran Via and another youth column from the Cathedral square to join in Plaça de Catalunya, where the political act will take place.

Parliament acted this Tuesday against the violations of the Code of Conduct in the hemicycle. After nine months and dragging four files –one from Aliança Catalana and three from Vox– before the Committee on the Status of Deputies, the body chaired by Antoni Castellà (Junts) agreed, in a secret closed-door session, to classify the actions of the leader of Aliança Catalana, Sílvia Orriols, as a minor offense. Now the committee will transfer this opinion to the bureau of Parliament, which will be responsible for deciding and applying the final sanction. This punishment can range from a public reprimand to a financial fine of between 600 and 12,000 euros.

Vilanova del Vallès chains weeks of betrayals, corruption accusations, uncovered negligence projects and a motion of no confidence held this Tuesday by the hand of some renegade councilors who were in the current municipal government, but who left two weeks ago and have been rewarded with the mayoralty. Josep Casals was sworn in as mayor this Tuesday after breaking with his party and thanks to an agreement with the historic rival in the municipality. Furthermore, as ARA has been able to learn, Casals is being courted by Aliança Catalana to become the party's candidate in the next municipal elections. However, it is not yet "closed" even though work is being done on it, according to party sources. He clarifies that he is not "in contact with anyone" for this purpose, although Aliança Catalana's interest in the municipality is evident, according to sources consulted by ARA.

Enric Daza, spokesperson for Junts in the Cambrils City Council, will be Aliança Catalana's candidate in the next municipal elections. This was announced this Monday at an event held in Cambrils, accompanied by the Secretary of Organization of Aliança Catalana, Oriol Gès, and the head of the list for Tarragona of the party in the last elections to the Parliament of Catalonia, Aurora Fornos.

The national board of Junts has convened this Monday at six in the afternoon a municipal summit with about twenty officials, including lead candidates and mayors of regional capitals in the country, to close the year by addressing the party's main challenges. And among these, the decline in surveys like the CEO's, just four days ago, and the rise of Aliança Catalana at the expense of the unionists reflected in it. With less than a year to go until the municipal elections and only three days before the resolution of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the amnesty, the general secretary, Jordi Turull, has led the direction in the online meeting, in which militants from multiple regions have expressed their opinion on the party's course in a complex context.

Jordi Aragonès, who is the candidate for mayor of Barcelona of the winning party of the CEO, the far-right Catalan Alliance, gave an interview a few days ago to the newspaper Abc, for the saying that those who do not gather do not resemble each other.The headline chosen by the newspaper founded by Torcuato Luca de Tena made an impact on social media: “We must not confront Catalans and Castilians, the common enemy is the caliphate”. The rest of the interview dealt with the proposals of Sílvia Orriols' party for the Catalan capital. Housing? Deregulation of the market and construction in abundance. Maragall or Pujol? Noucentisme, Catalonia city, order, discipline, daily mass and going to bed with the maids (this was not said in the interview, but it was inherent in the candidate's discourse). The interview also revealed that AC leaders have as much intention of leading Catalonia to independence as of sticking their fingers into an electrical socket. Independence is, for them, the carrot to attract unwary voters, an addition stuck to the front of the trumpist baseball cap. They coat it, the carrot, with an ethnicist stucco that does not make it more viable, but rather more toxic.In its ideological aspect (besides being a candidate for Barcelona, Jordi Aragonès says he is the party's ideologue), Aliança Catalana recovers – it's no news – a kind of petty-bourgeois fascism, what we could call a scared fascism. They are not proper fascists: they are little fascist shit, with intellectualist pretensions and the mental horizon of a village pious woman. They are the arrival station of a long itinerary of degradation that separatism has inflicted upon itself during almost ten years of giving rope to phantoms who impart lessons of resentful and mediocre patriotism. The leaders of AC aspire to play in the league of low or not so low intensity fascism, the kind that is starting to be strong enough in Europe (with figures like Meloni in Italy, Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla in Germany, or Marine Le Pen in France) to impose an aberration like the PEMA – the European Pact on Migration and Asylum, in force since June 12th – to send illegal immigrants to detention camps in non-EU countries. The unifying enemy cannot be Spain, precisely because it is a European and Catholic country, because they expect it to soon be governed by their Spanish counterparts (Vox and PP), and because, lo and behold, Catalonia continues to be part of it and they will certainly need to do some business there. The unifying enemy, therefore, will be the usual one: the poor. Among the poor, the immigrant. Among immigrants, the Moroccan, the Muslim, the Moor. The caliphate, which is secretly preparing the substitution of Catalans, another toxic carrot that appeals to fear and human misery, smeared with disinformation and aporophobia. In this, AC truly represents the old fascism of all time: racism, supremacism, the pointing out of the weak as an enemy and as a threat. It is objectively unpleasant to have to see this bad weed reborn. When the great substitution begins, let them be substituted first.

The recent CEO survey can easily lead to two opposing conclusions: The first is the existence of underlying electoral currents that invite the alarmists to imagine a country ideologically shattered and with a large presence of disaffected people or supporters of this tendency of ours (constant but intermittent) to throw everything away.But the same data allow for a second reading. Based on cold arithmetic, while accepting that the country is a hornet's nest, the poll does not allow us to imagine many scenarios beyond a more or less nuanced continuation, that is, a government resulting from the pact between PSC and ERC, with the support of the Comuns or Junts, depending on its outcome. It would not be an overwhelming majority, but it would have the atomization of the opposition in its favor, which will turn out to be an insoluble mixture of ideological enemies.The great destabilizing factor that the CEO reveals is the consolidated existence of a dual far-right vote – Catalan and Spanish – around 25% of the votes (more than 30%, if we add the PP). The dazzling irruption of Sílvia Orriols' party is what most catches the attention, because it could go from nothing to 25 deputies, positioning itself in first place in Girona and Lleida, which demonstrates not only the rightward shift of the electorate, a phenomenon common throughout Europe, but also the defensive turn of a part of the independence movement, which has exchanged the naive illusion of ten years ago for radicalism (fruit of repression and the “rendition” of traditional independence), and also due to the fear of national dissolution as a consequence of demographic changes.

Any information that alters the perception of reality is news. A CEO poll has become an event because it attributes to Aliança Catalana an unusual jump from 2 seats to a range of 23-25 (third force). A punishment for Junts that has just been rounded off with ERC's conversion into the second force. The PSC, with a certain setback, continues to lead the situation. The left of the left, Comuns and company, remains in limbo.

The result of the CEO survey puts numbers to a reality that we have all felt on the street, that of the growing voting intention of many people towards Aliança Catalana. What happens is that these numbers are -or would be, rather- a political tsunami and would represent a new page in the history of Catalan society.Going from the two deputies they have now to 23-25 as the CEO says is a tsunami. And for Junts, going from 35 to 13-18 is also one.When a party's main message is as basic as “Save Catalonia” and it is formulated by a leader who is not at all empathetic, at the head of an unknown team, and, even so, their electoral expectations skyrocket, it means that they have connected with the real or suggested discontents of many people, in relation to insecurity in the streets, Islamic radicalism, “massive” immigration, the emigration of well-prepared young Catalans, the decline of the language or fiscal plunder. Many Catalans feel – and what is worse, notice – that the country is slipping through their fingers. And pay attention, because the diagnosis has found a new centrality in which voters from the integrating Catalanism of Junts and Convergència to the bullfighting and Vox Legion Spanish nationalists have come to coincide. 1 out of every 3 votes that Aliança Catalana would win would come from Junts, and 1 out of every 4 votes would come from Vox, united by the flag of Islamophobia. The current parliamentary majority of PSC, Esquerra, Comuns would barely hold on, with the PSC dropping from 42 to 36-38. The government of appeasement, the one of management, is not being sufficient, among other things because the management is clearly improvable.That Aliança Catalana has detected the causes of discontent does not mean it has the capacity to remedy them. In fact, far-right parties are specialists in identifying culprits, but they are not as effective when it comes to finding solutions; on the contrary, because there can be a very short step from harshness to hatred that breaks societies. And with hatred, we are heading towards a new social fracture. Look at the report by Sebastián Marín, about how about 400 people of Moroccan origin gathered last night in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat to follow France-Morocco in the World Cup, in a meeting organized by the Moroccan consulate in Barcelona. Let's take it as a phenomenon: we cannot confuse the effects of radical Islamism, or the crime associated with the poverty of some immigrants, with living alongside neighbors of the Islamic faith. And the far-right, as we know, mixes everything up.The CEO's survey implicates Junts and within Junts, President Puigdemont. He should have been able to live in Catalonia for months now, under the amnesty law, but the judiciary has blocked it. This harms the expectations of a party that heavily relies on the almost iconic figure of the president in exile. At the same time, it is evident that we have gone from a Puigdemont with political initiative, who moved around Europe and overcame arrests and was very present in the media to direct the message, to a Puigdemont who basically only speaks on social media, with an often resentful tone, marked by the almost nine years of exile, the poor results of the negotiation with the PSOE, which conveys the idea that he doesn't care about the PP or the PSOE, because for Catalonia's purposes they are the same. Puigdemont had the status of a political rock star. Today, Aliança Catalana is acting as a substitute for the interest in politics, for the emotional vote, that the Process represented. And Junts will not be able to address it effectively if it does not stop being a party angry with the world (for whatever reason it may have) and begins to generate confidence and pride among the people.

Aliança Catalana is the party that is growing the most in the polls. In the CEO barometer, it is in second position in Parliament and is close to leading the pro-independence bloc. Thousands of potential votes that will have to seek an alternative in the general elections. The party leader, Sílvia Orriols, has committed to incorporating into Aliança Catalana's statutes that they will never run in Spanish elections. Where would these votes go, then?

The latest CEO study has put numbers to the conversations we've all heard at some point, which anticipate an extraordinary leap for Aliança Catalana in Parliament. When a party's main message is as basic as "Save Catalonia" and it's formulated by a leader who is not at all empathetic, at the head of an unknown team, and yet its electoral expectations soar, it means it has connected with the real or suggested discontents of many people, regarding street insecurity, Islamic radicalism, "massive" immigration, the emigration of well-prepared young Catalans, the decline of the language, or fiscal plundering. And, pay attention, because the diagnosis has found a new centrality where voters from the integrationist Catalanism of Junts and Convergència to the bull-and-Legion Spanish nationalists of Vox have come to coincide. One flag unites them: Islamophobia.

The CEO survey confirms the trends that ARA's already pointed to and which draws a double axis of growth on the Catalan political map: one that concentrates opposition to Salvador Illa's executive, and which is currently held by Aliança Catalana, and another that gathers the left-wing vote considered most useful to stop the far-right, which is currently ERC of the Junqueras-Rufián tandem. To summarize, we can say that Aliança is the anti-Illa party and ERC is the anti-Orriols party. And currently, the survey places these two parties vying for second position in hypothetical parliamentary elections.

The PSC would win the parliamentary elections again if they were held today, despite maintaining a downward trend that would take them from the 42 seats obtained in 2024 to a range of between 36 and 38. However, the most relevant image offered by the barometer of the Centre d'Estudis d'Opinió (CEO) made public yesterday is the consolidation of Aliança Catalana on the right of the parliamentary spectrum. Sílvia Orriols' party climbs to 23-25 deputies (it currently has 2) and clearly surpasses Junts per Catalunya, its main rival, which would lose half of its support to a range of between 16 and 18 deputies. ERC is the other party that is rising, consolidating the second position already predicted by other polls, up to 24-26 deputies.

"Whoever comes to commit crimes must know they have no place in our society." Read in isolation and without any context, it might currently be difficult to guess which leader or political party this phrase might come from. The reality, however, is that it is an excerpt from the Catalan PP's position paper for its 16th congress just a few days ago. This discursive forcefulness brings an evidence to the table and introduces a lively debate: Spanish politics, as well as Catalan politics, is shifting towards an increasingly radicalized right.

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.

Ten months and a half remain until the municipal elections, and parties are still debating candidacies and programs. At Junts, moreover, they have an important decision to make: what will they have to do with Aliança Catalana (AC). To curb its growth before the elections, but also to know whether they should form alliances afterward, knowing that Sílvia Orriols' party has set its sights on replacing them. What does the leadership say, and what does the local sphere think?

The governing committee of Aliança Catalana has unanimously agreed this Sunday, in a meeting held at ten in the morning, to "withdraw confidence" in Arnau Liesa as the party's candidate for Figueres City Council and to initiate the procedures for his expulsion from the formation. As reported by the party in a statement, the decision was made after learning of a "personal situation" which, it asserts, had not been previously communicated and which it considers "incompatible with the foundational principles" of the political project. The committee adds that, once the decision was communicated, Liesa "has opted to voluntarily disassociate himself from the party," a fact that the party "appreciates".

Aliança Catalana lost its headquarters in Berga, as reported by ARA, at the beginning of June. In fact, very visible signs made it clear that it would be evicted the following month and neighbors were asked to stop graffitiing there, as it would become a regional museum. Now, however, in a plot twist, the far-right party has settled in the former premises of the independentist left in the capital of Berguedà. That is to say, the space where the Casal Panxo was, which was previously a hub of sovereignist anti-capitalism in the city, is now in the hands of Sílvia Orriols's Islamophobic party, as announced on social media.