Summer, bird breeding season. Sparrows, greengrocers and other birds expand the family and it is not unusual to find a weaker one that has fallen from the nest. A binary world would be divided between those who know what to do to save it and those who don’t, and Gabriel Rufián would be in the first group. The 41-year-old ERC candidate for Barcelona has been raising birds since he was a child, he knows when they will live and when they will not, even if they eat, if they have broken something. His grandfather taught him.
But let no one imagine him dedicated to ornithology in his childhood. Weekends were for playing football, he explains. The owner of the ball rang the bell and they went down to the street. In Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Fondo is a working-class neighborhood, a mix of cultures and languages. “At school, in the street, we were children of Andalusians, Murcians, Galicians, and then from Morocco, India, Pakistan, South America, and it was a wealth”, he explains. Spanish was the language of play, Catalan was the normative language. Linguistic immersion began there, in Besòs, in the 1980s.
An only child, he explains that his parents met at a Red Flag rally. “At home I listened to Víctor Jara, Serrat, Silvio Rodríguez. Those letters… I asked, they explained. But the friends wanted to talk about Mijatovic, Ronaldo, not politics,” he says.
The parents had a leather workshop. “I did my homework at the table where my father cut patterns and my mother sewed,” he remembers. At that time he became fond of Son Goku, the anime he watched on TV3, with the sewing machine in the background. Over the years, the family moved to Badalona, ??the city next door. Now he also lives there, apart from Madrid.
He studied Labor Relations and worked unloading trucks and in clothing stores to pay for college, he explains. He studied a master’s degree in Human Resources Management and worked for ten years in a service company, in personnel selection.
His move to politics came in 2014, with the process as a catalyst. She joined Súmate, a promoter of independence among Spanish speakers, joined the secretariat of the National Assembly of Catalonia and started going to social gatherings. On Christmas Eve 2015, Oriol Junqueras proposed to him to go to Congress, as part of the strategy to expand the base of ERC. Then he asked him to join the party. And on the 28th M trusted him again to win votes in the metropolitan area and in Santa Coloma, where he is a councillor.
With a scathing and provocative style, very media-friendly, Rufián is a star for his people and the target of attacks from opponents, particularly from the far-right. But the character sometimes becomes indomitable. “Outside of politics I’m very different, I don’t talk much, nor do I fight with anyone, I understand that it’s surprising”, he says. In the last legislature he had to negotiate with the PSOE-UP Government, perhaps now he has to deal with a PP-Vox coalition. He reached out to Junts for the front in Madrid. Polls give them a tie.
Read non-stop Cormac McCarthy and Pérez-Reverte. And to shake off the stress and get in shape, he runs 12 kilometers through the Serralada de Marina, while rehearsing his interventions out loud. to see it
