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.

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.

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 Orriols surname has become increasingly popular in Catalan politics since the mayor of Ripoll came to power with a fiery speech against immigration and against other pro-independence parties. She is one of the founders of Aliança Catalana, the far-right party that is gaining the most in polls, especially at the expense of Junts. But there is also an Orriols who precisely represents Carles Puigdemont's formation: Irina Orriols, the sister. She is a councilor in Sora, a small town of just over 200 inhabitants in the Osona region, bordering Ripollès. The political origin of the two sisters is the same, the Front Nacional de Catalunya. In fact, they ran together in 2019 in Ripoll, with Sílvia as the lead candidate and Irina in a symbolic number 9, to accompany her sister. But in 2023 they chose different paths and, in Sora, Irina Orriols was the fourth most voted councilor when she represented Junts with the open list system.