OVIEDO, Spain

Silvia Orriols, a far-right separatist leader of the Catalan town of Ripoll, has started a campaign this week to remove halal menus from public schools. 

Around 13% of Ripoll’s population of around 10,600 is foreign-born, according to Catalan government statistics. The town is home to a large Muslim community.

But in 2023, Ripoll elected Orriols to office, making her the first mayor of the anti-immigrant Catalan separatist party Alianca Catalana, which she also founded.

Her latest controversial statement came on Monday, when she announced that she had filed a motion to ensure all meat served in Ripoll schools comes from animals that were slaughtered after being sedated or stunned.

“Get halal menus out of public schools!” she wrote on social media platform X.

On Tuesday, leading Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia published an article reporting that Halal menus are not even offered to public school children in Ripol. 

She later accused La Vanguardia of lying.

“The menu they offer is not called ‘the halal menu,’ but it is conveniently called the ‘menu without pork.’ Before you ask, I can already tell you there is no ‘menu without chicken’ or ‘menu without rabbit,’” she posted on X, ignoring her original complaint about the method of slaughter.

Just before that, Orriols tweeted: “While the woke Europeans talk about Islamophobia… Islamic fundamentalists killed (in 15 years) 52,000 Christians in Nigeria.”

On Jan. 19, the Spanish government gave her administration 20 days to explain its management of registering new residents.

At least 12 new immigrant residents have complained that the city council is putting up obstacles to delay or make it impossible for them to sign up for local services like health care and schooling, according to daily El Periodico.

“They sent two police to my home to make sure I lived there. I feel totally discriminated against. I’m self-employed, I pay taxes, I pay my mortgage and this woman just doesn’t feel like registering me,” Fazeel, a man from Pakistan waiting for his papers who has lived in Catalonia for a decade but recently moved to Ripol, told El Pais at a recent protest.

Orriols is the president of the Alianca Catalana, a party she spun off of the National Front of Catalonia (FNC), a group with a similar anti-immigrant and Catalan nationalist ideology. However, she said the FNC was too moderate on immigration, according to the local paper Ripolles Digital.

In 2023, after her victory in Ripoll, she declared that the “reconquest of Catalonia” began in her town, located near the border of France.

In August, Orriols urged the Catalan government to ban ‘burkinis’ in municipal swimming pools. The same month, she also hosted an event in Barcelona to further her plan to expand across Catalonia, according to El Pais.

By October, the five local opposition parties signed a joint statement saying they were “very worried about the increase in tension and anger within the population,” and by the “discourse of hate that could lead to a situation of violence and discrimination.”

While Orriols remains something of a fringe figure, her success, as well as the ability of her former party FNC to govern in another town, is raising alarm bells about the future of Catalan separatism.

“After all the broken promises [of Catalan separatism], they are reaching for the recipe book of the far-right around the world — redirecting anger onto immigrants,” wrote journalist and doctor in social anthropology Nuria Alabao in digital daily CTXT.