“We have not run to invest pro-Spanish or pro-independence process politicians”. That is how forceful Sílvia Orriols was in 2024 during her first intervention in Parliament after Aliança Catalana arrived there with two deputies. At that time, she was referring to the possible investiture of the leader of Junts, Carles Puigdemont, but now this path is the one that Aliança Catalana plans to adopt also at the municipal level. During the party's second municipalist convention held in Ripoll on September 19, the group outlined the strategy to be followed by the councilors who are elected. As in Parliament, Aliança will not invest candidates from the three pro-independence parties (Junts, ERC and the CUP) nor those of Spanish obedience, such as the PSC, the PP and Vox.

The leadership of Aliança Catalana has nipped in the bud an internal revolt by militants from different regions who were demanding more internal democracy. The trigger was a letter promoted and signed by these affiliates, in which they demanded that the party's participation in the general elections be put to a vote. A debate that the president of the organization, Sílvia Orriols, stopped in its tracks by threatening to leave the party if the leadership opted to make the leap to Congress. "The day the governing committee decides otherwise, I will tear up my membership card and go back to working as an administrative assistant in the private sector," she wrote in a tweet, facing the rumblings from part of the base and even some members of the leadership who were defending it privately.

The leader of the fascist party Aliança Catalana, Sílvia Orriols, encouraged her voters a few days ago, in an interview on Ràdio 4, to vote for Vox in the Spanish elections. When asked if she saw any contradictions between voting for Vox in the Spanish elections and Aliança Catalana in the elections to the Parliament of Catalonia, she replied: “I don't think so. They [the voters], in the context of the Spanish elections, put their trust in whoever they consider appropriate, and in the context of the Principality of Catalonia, they put their trust in us because they consider that our project, which involves the restoration of the Catalan state, is the most appropriate or suitable for reaching the welfare state they yearn for”. The same day, in an interview with La Vanguardia, Santiago Abascal stated that his party is willing to “collaborate with Aliança Catalana to defend the Catalan identity” against the caliphate (he calls it “the Muslim threat”). The courtship is in sight, the declaration of principles is clear on both sides.

Jaume Valls, who was dismissed as coordinator of the ANC in Vilassar de Mar when he was named mayoral candidate for Aliança Catalana, is not throwing in the towel. The activist has asked the ANC's deontological committee to clarify whether the economic and administrative management commission, which is the body that communicated his dismissal, has the authority to remove him as coordinator. "What I question is that an administrative commission acts as both judge and party. The ANC has always been a guarantor, and in this case, someone has decided without taking the regulations into account," Valls denounces in a conversation with ARA. "And my rights have not been respected, nor those of the members in Vilassar who voted for me," he adds, visibly angry at the decision adopted by the entity's leadership.

At the gates of the elections, the ERC candidate, Gabriel Rufián, publishes How to beat the fascists (Ara Llibres), in which he breaks down the keys to combat the far right and, in this way, avoid a victory for the PP with the support of Vox on 29-N. Below, we offer you a decalogue with the most important ideas of this work that distills the sharp style of the republican leader:

Jaume Valls is no longer the coordinator of the ANC in Vilassar de Mar. As learned by ARA, the Assembly informed him that he was being dismissed as the entity's top representative in the Maresme town after it was made public that he will be the mayoral candidate for Aliança Catalana. It did so on September 30th, just two days after ARA published that Valls called Sílvia Orriols' party "fascist" when he was secretary of the entity in April 2024. Sources from the Assembly explained that the procedure to dismiss him was already underway and that it was not adopted before the publication of the article because the body responsible for making his removal effective first had to meet. The dismissal was carried out via an email in which he was informed that it was incompatible to be a candidate for a party and at the same time hold a position in the entity, as established by the internal regulations.

On November 29th there will be no Aliança Catalana ballot at the polling stations and there is a good number of potential voters for the party presided over by Sílvia Orriols who will look for alternatives. Who benefits most from this situation? For some time now, surveys have been drawing a scenario in which there are two parties that stand out as option B for citizens who, when the time comes for the Catalan elections, are clear that they will choose Aliança. Almost 4 out of every 10 of these voters will opt for either Vox (18.5%) or Junts (18%), according to the latest barometer from the Centre for Opinion Studies (CEO), published this Wednesday.

The PSC would win the Spanish elections again as it did in 2023, with an incontestable victory like the one it achieved three years ago. This is the forecast made by the Center for Opinion Studies (CEO) a month and a half before the elections. Salvador Illa's party would also win the Catalan elections, but with a narrower margin than in 2024, with ERC and Aliança Catalana fighting for second place. This is clear from the second barometer of 2026, which was presented this Wednesday with a survey conducted between September 1st and October 5th, just the day before Pedro Sánchez called early elections.

The early call for elections in Spain will not change Aliança Catalana's decision not to run. Neither will the good electoral prospects of Sílvia Orriols' party, which polls, such as this weekend's in La Vanguardia, place as the second force in Parliament. The resolution adopted by the governing committee is firm, although some members of the leadership do privately argue for running in the general elections so as not to leave their electorate orphaned. "There is no debate," insist party sources, however.

Aliança 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 “cordons sanitaires 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 list leaders is reproached to her.

"The espadrille or the swastika. You choose." The question was asked in an article this very week by the former president of the Generalitat and leader of Junts, Carles Puigdemont, after in the Parliament chamber Junts, ERC, CUP and Comuns displayed the famous poster "Let's crush fascism", created in 1936 by the photographer and publicist Pere Català i Pic. Well, there is at least one Junts councilor who chooses the swastika. It is Roger Pinart, second deputy mayor of Port de la Selva, who has published a clear message on social media. "In this case, swastika", he wrote on X, responding to Junts' unequivocally anti-fascist post: "Against hate, now and always. With President Companys, now and always".

It is no coincidence that the same party –Aliança Catalana– that congratulates the German AfD with the "Ja hem passat!" (We have passed!) that the Francoists chanted in 1939 when they entered Madrid has committed the "mistake" of voting in favor of the Vox deputy who insulted the memory of President Lluís Companys by labeling him a murderer. Because if you are Catalan and a democrat, you cannot be mistaken about Companys in any way.

Surprise at the Parliament's Board of Spokespersons. Aliança Catalana supported Vox this Tuesday in an attempt to prevent the spokesperson for the Spanish nationalist party, Joan Garriga, from being admonished for his insults against Lluís Companys, calling him a murderer. Despite the combined votes of these two parties and the PP, the proposal from Garriga's party did not go through and the sanction remains. Nevertheless, during the press conference before the media, Garriga thanked these two parties for their support for his request that the Bureau reconsider the sanction for violating the code of conduct.

The Cecor is a coordination center full of screens from where the heads of a Mossos d'Esquadra operation follow its progress. And what was set up for the eve of the Diada was not easy. At the Fossar de les Moreres there was an event called by Aliança Catalana and at that same time the pro-independence left called for counter-protests in the area to try to prevent the pro-independence far-right from reaching the meeting. Several Mossos public order cordons closed the access to the Fossar and at several moments the anti-fascist protesters tried to overcome them. It would be too bold, police sources state, to say that they were really about to overcome this cordon, but there were moments of tension and the police line had to take a step back. The question that various sources are asking is what would have happened if the two protests had managed to meet. The most repeated answer is that there would have been clashes between protesters.

The courts have ruled in favor of Sílvia Orriols. The Girona courts have upheld the appeal by the leader of Aliança Catalana against the 10,001-euro fine imposed by the Generalitat for linking Islam to "gang rapes, genital mutilation, and forced marriages," and have annulled the financial sanction. "We celebrate this enormously. [...] Sílvia has won," stated Jordi Coma, a member of the party's legal secretariat, in statements collected by the ACN during the party's II Municipalist Convention of the far-right party in Ripoll.

This Friday, hundreds of anti-fascists demonstrated against the Vox event in Barcelona, where their leader, Santiago Abascal, had not appeared for two years. This has been the third mobilization by the far-left in just seven days. On Thursday the 10th, they took to the streets en masse to boycott the Aliança Catalana event at the Fossar de les Moreres, and the following day they did so again against the ultra-right group Núcleo Nacional, which held a rally with fascist salutes and slogans. In all three counter-demonstrations, incidents occurred and the Mossos d'Esquadra charged to prevent clashes with those organizing the events. But what are both sides seeking with their calls to action?

“I believe in Vilanova i la Geltrú. I believe in its people. And I believe that the best of Vilanova i la Geltrú is yet to be written,” stated Xavier Cusiné during his presentation as the mayoral candidate for Aliança Catalana on June 20th. He will not write it with Sílvia Orriols' party. As ARA has learned, Cusiné has decided to step down from the candidacy, citing "personal reasons," although disagreements with the party's organization secretary, Oriol Gès, could be behind his departure. "They couldn't even stand each other, and this isn't something new," sources from the party state.

In a recent interview with El País the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk spoke about the latest elections in Saxony-Anhalt and noted that the emergence of Alternative for Germany is causing the normalization of far-right ideas. One of the most interesting points in the interview is that Sloterdijk points out a factor that could be affecting Western democracies more than we might think: that of polls, which in recent times have increased exponentially and occupy a considerable space in the political sections of the media. Every week we are given polls, says the philosopher of his country, something that also happens here. He states that they are like a training ground to stop feeling ashamed of voting for this type of party and that they create a perverse effect, as if the ghost of the virtual result, he says, ended up becoming reality. In this sense, polls would be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Anti-processist, pro-Israeli and Islamophobic. With this calling card, it was not difficult to foresee that Joan Carretero would support Aliança Catalana, as has ended up happening. He is the first former minister of the Generalitat to publicly position himself in favor of Sílvia Orriols' party. He announced it in a tweet just after the Diada following the insults that the party leader received during the anti-fascist protests at the Fossar and the September 11th demonstration, and also due to an incident she suffered in Puigcerdà. "These days AC has gained, at least, 1 vote: the shouts of “Jew” at Sílvia Orriols and the tugging this morning by a Moorish son of a bitch (redundancy) who wanted to steal the chain I wear around my neck with the Magen David have made up my mind," he wrote in reference to the Star of David, the six-pointed symbol associated with the Jewish people and Judaism, which he wore around his neck. "Maybe they won't change anything, however, this pisses off everyone who has filled Catalonia with thieves, rapists and murderers. I continue with the thought that one cannot participate in the Spanish institutions in Catalonia. We will annoy the processists," he added in the tweet.

President Illa has decided to break the monotony, conscious, perhaps, that it was trapping him. His restrained tone was rewarded during the bewilderment of the 'Procés' aftermath and, by making a virtue of calm, he grasped the country's need to lower the tone and take a pause. With this criterion, and with his rejection of shrillness, Illa has been making progress, at a time when the exercise of conjuncturally assuming the framework of the possible seemed to be imposing itself.