The rise of Aliança Catalana puts Salvador Illa's normalization strategy in Catalonia at risk

The socialist Salvador Illa arrived at the Generalitat in 2024 promising the "normalization" of Catalonia and the end of the process. Without caring about the accusations of being a branchist, the PSC leader presented the recovery of institutional power after fifteen uninterrupted years of nationalist governments as a vital part of Pedro Sánchez's plurinational project for Spain. The two went hand in hand: the "pacification" of Catalonia through pardon, amnesty, new financing and the continuity of nationalist cultural power - in school, in the media and at the university - were the concessions to consolidate the alliance with the separatist parties, preserve La Moncloa and move towards a confederal reform of the autonomous State. Also included in that offer was the deactivation of all civic constitutionalism and its associations in Catalonia.

Initially, this script, in which Illa replaced nationalism - she did not fight it - seduced the Catalan elites, the most Sanchista among the Sanchistas (out of economic interest, as well as woke imposture and hatred of the PP), but the unexpected emergence and rise of Aliança Catalana - which the PSC promoted to deactivate Junts in a clear miscalculation -, with all the polls predicting that it will return the absolute majority to the independence movement, has busted Illa's roadmap.

Although Aliança is applauded by a Madrid right that, in its obsession with removing Sánchez from power, only sees in it the way to weaken him in Catalonia, and that also listens with fascination and envy to a speech against Muslims that not even Vox dares to articulate, the formation of Sílvia Orriols represents in the medium term a new Catalan threat to democracy in Spain.

A more serious threat than the hypothetical electoral recovery of Junts and ERC could pose, because Aliança is managing with its anti-immigration narrative to break the division of identity blocs - independence or Spanish - that characterizes Catalan politics. It has already begun to attract citizens who reject sedition, and whose ideological positions are even closer to PP, Vox or PSC, but who see in this party the way to bring order to the streets and put an end to the arrival of foreigners. Without yet understanding that the same logic that denies immigrants the right to be Catalan citizens can one day be applied to them "by Spanish settlers."

Aliança is fully aware that it enjoys that "borrowed" vote, which some polls place at 30%, and that it needs it to enter the metropolitan areas of Barcelona and Tarragona. The objective in which Junts and ERC always failed. That is why Orriols focuses on immigration and "the war on the Moor", tactically tempering the patriotic outbursts, with a discourse that unites the old Catalan nationalism - which was always xenophobic - with the vanguard of the European extreme right, and that allows him to gradually expand the voter base of the independence movement.

The growth of Aliança, the new separatist majority that can be formed in the Parliament and the weakness of civil constitutionalism are the demonstration that Illa's "peace" was a scam and that the amnesty, with all the social and institutional wear and tear that it entailed, only served to keep Sánchez in power and for nationalism to mutate into its most ultra, dangerous version with options for regaining power. Orriols continues to be, therefore, the forgotten legacy of socialism, the political 'daughter' of Sánchez and Illa.