IRR NEWS
Democratic municipal elections were held in Catalonia (four constituencies and forty-one counties) in 1979 for the first time after General Franco’s death, and since then the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) has always been the big winner. But in regional elections held on 22 May, the PSC lost 22 per cent of its base. It is now the second largest party in Catalonia with the centre-right Convergència i Unió (CiU) emerging as the largest political force in terms of numbers of votes. The Conservative People’s Party (PP), and the small far-right Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC) also emerged with more representation than before, the PxC securing 2.3 per cent.[1] Led by Josep Anglada, the PxC, founded by former supporters of General Franco nine years ago, now has sixty-seven councillors across Catalonia (previously seventeen) and did particularly well in L’Hospitalet del Llobegrat (Catalonia’s second most populated city), Badalona (a residential city within Greater Barcelona, and the third most populated Catalonian city), Vic (Barcelona province) and the southern Catalonian town of El Vendrell. The PxC now has four town councillors in Salt, a municipality near Girona which witnessed serious anti-immigrant violence in January 2010 and further disturbances in 2011 after Mohamed Reda Lyanmani, a 16-year-old Moroccan youth, died after falling from a fifth floor window while running away from the police.
The centre Right and far Right blamed immigration for rising crime and a lack of jobs in Spain, a country which has the highest rates of unemployment in the EU (21.3 per cent, with youth unemployment running at 44 per cent, double the EU’s average). The PP, at a national level, tried to separate itself from some of the actions of its members. In April, the PP national executive distanced itself from its Badalona branch after members distributed leaflets with the slogan ‘We don’t want Gypsies’ and ‘Romanian Gypsies are a plague’. And this after the PP was forced to apologise for what it described as an error when in November 2010 an online game called Rescue, was placed on its website inviting its players to bomb illegal immigrants.
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