"This fixation with giving up our own customs to please the counter-communities that dispute the land with us is an error for which we will pay dearly. They are the ones who have to adapt and dilute in our society, not us in theirs". The italics are mine. And the text is not from the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, or Jorge Buxadé, the ideologue of the new Spanish ultra-right. This is a tweet from the new mayor of the Catalan town of Ripoll, Sílvia Orriols, leader of the Catalan Alliance party. And it doesn't take much science to realize that the discourse of the political leader in the capital of the Ripollès county can be subscribed to by any racist - "dilute" our society (because ours is the good one and, if not, screw them) - or xenophobe. Whether one who practices a conscious xenophobia, more widely read or illustrated, like that of Orriols herself - "counter-communities", a term that is part of the supremacist theory of the great replacement or substitution - or one led by more primary, gut instincts - "that dispute the land with us". Yes, this is racism and xenophobia here, as it would be anywhere else. Another thing altogether is that some, without sharing the substance of the message, use it or exploit it as a (false) way out of many diverse problems that, for certain, go way beyond the limits of the municipality of Ripoll, starting with the idea of a Catalan independentism – Orriols is an independence supporter – which is right now totally disoriented.
Mayor Orriols responded with that tweet, bathed in pure innocence, to the criticisms that were directed at her after, last Friday - the Sant Joan's Eve midsummer festival in Catalonia - and with the intention of "recovering the Sant Joan bonfire" as the first measure of the new municipal government, summoned "everyone" to a municipal celebration where there would be - the official poster stated it - "coca pastry, fuet pork sausage and hot chocolate for everyone". I don't know if handing out fuet on St John's Night is a Ripoll tradition, but if so, it seems fine to me. At home, in El Maresme - and I don't know if in Conflent or El Vallespir, but I don't care - we eat coca and botifarra sausage and drink cava for Sant Joan (I don't know if because of a budget issue, Orriols left the cava in the refrigerator). The problem is that the poster and the invitation paid for with the taxes of all the residents of Ripoll exclude, at the outset, a fairly significant part of the whole, those who profess the Muslim faith and, therefore, do not eat pork. That's a significant part. And not so much because of the number – 13.3% of the 10,641 inhabitants registered in Ripoll are of immigrant origin, according to data from Idescat (2022) – but because of the fact that the person who is inviting them to partake of some fuet is the same person who placed them under suspicion because they are Muslims in a town, Ripoll, where a Salafist imam turned a group of youths of Maghreb origin into terrorists.
So this is what lies behind the fuet joke. An offensive and dangerous narrative that turns all Muslims, by virtue of being Muslims, into criminals. And it has been rewarded with a remarkable electoral success, which in no way gives Orriols the right to breach the minimum respect required of an authority figure towards her fellow citizens and now those she governs, whether they were born in Marrakesh or Lima. You may be against the Islamic veil, and there are many reasons for holding that view, but in a democratic society it is also totally logical, healthy and mentally hygienic to be highly skeptical toward what mayor Orriols is trying to achieve when she invites "everyone" to enjoy some fuet at a Sant Joan's Eve festival paid for with public money.
You may be against the Islamic veil, but in a democratic society it is also totally logical, healthy and mentally hygienic to be highly skeptical toward what mayor Orriols is trying to achieve when she invites "everyone" to enjoy some 'fuet' at a Sant Joan's Eve festival paid for with public money.
In fact, the subliminal message of Orriols was perfectly understood by those to whom it was addressed. It is only necessary to look over the comments on the city council's Twitter account: from the person who suggested adding "ham" or "coca de llardons" - a pork-fat pastry - to the midsummer menu, to the one who celebrated the presence of the sausage - "LOL the fuet", "That fuet idea is brilliant” - who even went on, since he did not lack creativity, to call for “chocolate with pork chops”. Someone pointed out that, in fact, it was not necessary because the pastry already had lard in it. In what sense "wasn't it necessary"? In the sense that the goal was to keep the non-Christian residents away from the festival like they were flies? "Ripoll has recovered its hope and the Sant Joan bonfire! And there was not a single piece of fuet left over", celebrated the mayor herself. "No one is excluded here. Anyone who feels excluded should go back to where they came from," explained another.
It will soon be six years, since the brutal jihadist attacks on the Rambla in Barcelona and in the town of Cambrils, from which I was left with the feeling that an excess of do-good spirit and misunderstood multiculturalism had allowed the serpent's egg in Ripoll to remain hidden for too long. After the results of the municipal elections on May 28th, which placed the Orriols list as the largest electoral plurality – 6 councillors out of 17 – and allowed her to gain access to the mayoralty s office due to the myopic politics of the other parties (Junts, ERC, the PSC and the CUP), I thought that, now, many people from Ripoll have gone to the other extreme, that of the normalization and trivialization of Islamophobia and xenophobic populism, after the previous sin of condescension had been purged. But it would be reductionist to limit the analysis to the electoral sociology of the county and its obviously-problematic experience with immigration from Islamic countries.
Orriols, who exerts the fascination of a kind of Catalan-style Giorgia Meloni, may end up becoming a candidate for those pro-independence supporters who no longer vote and call for abstention again in the July 23rd general election.
Orriols received the Canigó Flame in the Ripoll monastery on Friday with a black flag next to the tomb of Guifré el Pilós, legendary founding father of the Catalan nation. As though Ripoll was now the cradle of a new reconquista. Orriols is an identitarian independentist in whom a part of the pro-independence support that feels frustrated and abandoned by its leaders sees a kind of princess of the people or a justified revenge. There are already those who are encouraging her to run for the presidency of Catalonia. Beyond the allegedly innocuous provocation of the fuet against Muslim fellow residents, the Ripoll syndrome translates the malaise of an independence movement that has been denied any possible way out by the major parties involved in the process and which, in Catalonia as a whole, has been visible in the low turn-out in the municipal elections as a vote of punishment – that is, the 300,000 votes basically lost by ERC and not incorporated by Junts or the CUP. Orriols, who exerts the fascination of a kind of Catalan-style Giorgia Meloni, may end up becoming a candidate for the pro-independence supporters who no longer vote and call for abstention again in the general election of July 23rd. The fourth pro-independence party about which some have speculated could end up being this one and its character is to say the least frightening. In the end, only the four bars of the Catalan senyera flag separate Orriols' speeches from those of an Abascal or a Buxadé, a fact which can scarcely be good news for anyone.