Sílvia Orriols

Sílvia Orriols i Serra (born 9 October 1984) is a Spanish politician, president of the Catalan political party Catalan Alliance, and mayor of Ripoll since June 2023.^[1][2]

Biography[edit]

She has a degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Vic and has worked since 2006 as an administrator in a private company. As a politician, she has been active in several political parties. In 2004 she joined the Estat Català lists for the elections to the European Parliament. After the independence referendum in Catalonia in 2017, she began to actively participate in the Ripoll protests against the application of article 155, gradually becoming known thanks to these types of acts.^[3]

Subsequently, she joined the National Front of Catalonia, a party with which she ran in the 2019 local elections in Ripoll and obtained 503 votes and one councilor. The other parties in the council agreed on a cordon sanitaire, with the commitment not to agree or participate in electoral debates with her. In March 2020, she left the party and continued in the council as an independent councilor.^[4]

In July of that same year she founded a new political party, the Catalan Alliance party, with which she defends the independence of Catalonia and anti-Islam positions; The party considers that immigration is actually an invasion, an idea that is linked to the conspiracy theory of the great replacement.^[5]

Later, she ran for mayor of Ripoll in the 2023 local elections. The Catalan Alliance was the most voted party in the municipality, with 6 councilors and more than 30% of the votes. Faced with the possibility of her becoming mayor, most of the remaining political forces tried to implement a cordon sanitaire to prevent Orriols from becoming the mayor of Ripoll. However, these efforts were unsuccessful because Junts per Catalunya distanced itself from them, thus allowing Orriols to become the municipality's mayor.^[6][7]

References[edit]