Fascist group in Denia targets visiting Catalan politician
NEO-NAZI demonstrators made pro-Franco signs and chants at a high-profile Catalan politician when he visited Denia to present his book on Sunday.
Gabriel Rufián from the Esquerra Republicana Catalana (ERC), whose party is in favour of the north-eastern region’s secession from Spain and against the monarchy, had his non-fiction political essay published a year ago, but has only recently been on a promotional tour of it due to Spain being in lockdown when it hit the shelves.
The ERC spokesman’s earliest impression of Denia was of a group of fascists making Nazi salutes and chanting ¡Arriba España! (Up Spain!), a proclamation associated with the late dictator General Franco.
A police cordon stopped them getting close to Sr Rufián, who told reporters on the scene that he was concerned
about the rise of the far right.
“Nazism is gaining more courage than ever before,” he said.
“The left-wing as a whole is in the firing line.”
Sr Rufián said he had spent over two years working with ‘52 MPs who represent and defend terrible ideas’, referring to far-right party Vox.
“For example, they deny that dozens of women are murdered every year,” he said.
He called it a ‘poorly-articulated indignation mixed with a very strong media machinery’ which reaches the grass roots.
“Many people like those outside are earning the minimum wage, and yet the far right votes against increasing that minimum wage. It doesn’t make sense,” Sr Rufián declared.
Valencia’s regional and provincial governments are attempting to identify the fascist group, whose members could face fines or arrest.
The Law of Democratic Memory makes it a criminal offence to ‘act in public’ in a manner which ‘discredits, demeans or humiliates’ victims of Franco’s and other fascist regimes, ‘exalts Francoism, fascism or military uprising’, or ‘pays tribute to those who supported the dictatorship, fascism or military uprising’.