Summer, breeding season for birds. Sparrows, greenfinch and other birds extend the family and it is not uncommon to find one fallen from the nest in a park. 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 something has broken. He taught her his grandfather.
But let no one imagine him dedicated to ornithology in his childhood. Weekends were for playing soccer, 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 mixture of cultures and languages. “In my school, my street, we were the children of Andalusians, Murcians, Galicians, and later from Morocco, India, Pakistan, South America and it was a wealth,” he details. Spanish was the game language, Catalan was the normative language. Linguistic immersion began there, in Besòs, in the 1980s.
An only child, he says that his parents met at a Red Flag rally. “At home he listened to Víctor Jara, Serrat, Silvio Rodríguez. Those letters…, he asked, they told me. But my friends wanted to talk about Mijatovic, Ronaldo, not about politics, ”he says.
The parents had a fur workshop. “I did my homework at the table where my father cut patterns and my mother sewed,” she recalls. At that time she became fond of Son Goku, the manga that he watched on TV3, with the background rattle of the sewing machine. Over the years, the family moved to Badalona, ??the city next door. He also lives there, on horseback with Madrid.
He studied Labor Relations and worked unloading trucks and in clothing stores to pay for college, he explains. She completed a master’s degree in Human Resources Management and worked for ten years in a service company, in personnel selection.
His step into politics came in 2014, with the process as a catalyst. He joined Súmate, a promoter of independence among Spanish-speakers, entered the secretariat of the National Assembly of Catalonia and began to go to gatherings. On Christmas Eve 2015, Oriol Junqueras proposed to him to go to Congress, in his plan to expand the base of ERC. He then asked her to join. And on March 28, he again trusted him to win votes in the metropolitan area and in Santa Coloma, where he is a councilor.
With a scathing and provocative style, very popular in the media, Rufián is a star for his people and the target of attacks by his adversaries, particularly from the extreme right. But the character sometimes becomes indomitable. “Outside of politics I am very different, I don’t talk too much, I don’t fight with anyone, I understand that it is surprising,” he says. In the last legislature he had to negotiate with the PSOE-UP government, perhaps now he will have to face a PP-Vox coalition. He has extended his hand to Junts for the front in Madrid. The polls give them a tie.
Read Cormac McCarthy and Pérez-Reverte relentlessly. And to shake off stress and stay in shape, he is going to run, 12 kilometers through the Serralada de Marina, while he rehearses his interventions aloud. To see
