Far-right Catalans making waves across crisis-hit Spain

Published on Wednesday 18 May 2011 16:38

IT'S a blunt campaign message - a video shows three attractive young women in miniskirts skipping with a rope in the Spanish city of Igualada, to the accompaniment of a traditional Catalan folk song. Suddenly, the image changes to "Igualada 2015" and shows three women dressed in burkas skipping to the rhythm of an Arab song.

"You can avoid this nightmare becoming reality. In Igualada, vote Plataforma per Catalunya," the video concludes.

Plataforma per Catalunya is a far-right party created nine years ago by former supporters of General Francisco Franco in the north-eastern industrial province of Catalonia, and running in Sunday's regional elections in Spain.

Last year the party gained almost 3 per cent of the vote in the regional elections and now expects to increase its local vote five-fold, going from 17 to more than 100 council members across Catalonia and possibly winning control of some cities.

Plataforma per Catalunya is riding a growing wave of anti-immigration sentiment, where many blame foreigners - 12 per cent of the Spanish population - for rising crime and a lack of jobs, in a country with 20 per cent official unemployment.

"We didn't have much money so I did this video to create an impact, but I never imagined the huge reaction it would provoke," Roberto Hernando, the party's number two candidate and director of the video, told The Scotsman yesterday.

"We keep getting e-mails and letters from people across Spain begging us to expand nationally.

"With this crisis we shouldn't allow more immigrants into the country, especially Muslims who want to impose their culture upon others."

Along with many people from the poorer South American countries, Spain has seen an influx of immigrants from north African countries such as Morocco.

Mr Hernando says his party is in close touch with other European extremists, including Austria's FPO led by Heinz-Christian Strache, Filip Dewinter from the Belgian Vlaams Belang party and the Italian Northern League, with the idea of forming a unified force in Europe in the future.

But he prefers not to comment on the Francoist past of his party's leader, Josep Anglada, a former disciple of fascist figure Blas Piar, or the resignation of the party's former secretary-general in 2003 after accusing Mr Anglada of having links with neo-Nazi groups.

This past has not prevented the Plataforma per Catalunya from growing in Catalonia to the point that Spain's main opposition, the conservative Popular Party (PP), has adopted an anti-immigration platform in some cities to stave off its challenge.In Badalona, a huge sprawling industrial city next to Barcelona, for example, the PP candidate Xavier Garcia Albiol now promises a "strong hand" against immigrants, accusing them of taking advantage of social housing and national health programmes. Despite all this, few expect the anti-immigration populist messages to dominate the campaign, and for far-right Spanish parties to grow as fast as in other European countries such as Holland and Finland, at least not yet.

Josep Oliver, a prominent economist at the Universidad Autonoma of Barcelona, emphasises that more than a third of the growth in Spain's economy during the boom years - 1997 to 2008 - was thanks to five million immigrants who arrived in the country and worked in low-paying jobs in construction and tourism, something most Spaniards still recognise today.

"The anti-immigration message is false. The main subsidy in Spain is for the unemployed, but it's linked to having worked in the past, which doesn't apply to the majority of immigrants," Mr Oliver said.