Sílvia Orriols

Orriols has a degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Vic and has worked since 2006 as a secretary 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 was part of the Ripoll protests against the application of article 155, which elevated her profile.^[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 won one councilor seat. 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 town council as an independent councillor.^[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][failed verification]}

Orriols ran for mayor of Ripoll in the 2023 local elections. The Catalan Alliance was the most voted party in the municipality, with 6 councillors and more than 30% of the votes. As the leader of the largest party, she would become mayor by default unless an absolute majority of councillors rallied behind a single candidate.^[6] 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 mayor of Ripoll. However, these efforts were ultimately unsuccessful as Junts per Catalunya failed to join the pact, voting for their own candidate, and thus preventing the ERC candidate from achieving the majority of votes needed to prevent Orriols from becoming the municipality's mayor.^[7][8]

She successfully ran in the 2024 Parliament of Catalonia election for Girona, getting one seat, while managing to obtain another one for Lleida for her Catalan Alliance party.^[9]