On a sleepless night, Roger Montañola turns on the computer. Forget counting sheep to fall asleep. The 37-year-old PDECat-Espai CiU candidate for Barcelona sets out to see the world on his favorite geography channel, An Immense World. This week the destination was an island lost in the South Atlantic, two weeks away by boat. Or he opens Google Earth and follows the northern coast of Russia, from the Bering Strait to Norway; or he dives into the sea trenches, he knows them all. “I’m a geography geek,” he says.
Travel is not just virtual. “I was able to travel a lot as a child,” she says. But every weekend she returns to Premià de Dalt, where she grew up and where his parents live, a doctor and a teacher, a middle-class family, Catalan. He studied at a secular concerted school. At home he talked little about politics. “As a child, for Premià you would meet President Pujol and the children would go to greet him. And we believed that he and Núñez were the same person, they looked alike,” he laughs.
Summer memories are on the beach: “From June to September in the beach bars, first loves, friends. Barefoot and on the sand, that’s how we socialized,” she explains.
His first contact with politics came through a weekend job. At the age of 16, he worked as a waiter at Set59, the fashionable nightclub in Maresme, owned by Josep Sánchez-Llibre, and the director introduced him to Unió Democràtica. The currency of the pact and the Europeanism convinced him and he joined. In a short time he was already leading the youth.
He studied Political Science at Pompeu Fabra University and before finishing he was a CiU councilor in Premià. At the age of 24, he was the youngest member of Parliament. He coincided with Inés Arrimadas (Cs), Alicia Romero (PSC) or Marta Vilalta (ERC), with whom he shares, along with others, the Youngdipus WhatsApp group, which they keep active. In 2015, the CiU coalition broke up due to differences over the procés: “I stayed as spokesperson for the 10 Unió deputies and those who had been my colleagues became my adversaries.”
He went to the private sector, set up a consulting firm, which was later acquired by another larger company. For a year he has repeated the experience but now with the sister of his business partner. Its scope is new technologies, and the regulation of what does not yet exist: “For example, can parcels be sent with drones?”
He has played golf since he was a child, he started in the garden at home and has a professional level, he says. He likes soccer, tennis, skiing, and goes jogging when he can. And he plays the piano. “It is the manual of the posh Catalan”, he laughs. He only reads books that give him knowledge. And he likes varied music, but he has fixations: “In the car I play songs that I know,” he says.
“I am happy and I am very much in love,” he says of his partner, a lawyer and economist. It is pure optimism and transversal spirit. The PDECat is pro-independence in the statutes, but he is not. Nor is it militant. If elected on 23-J, he will apply the CiU recipe in Congress, the peix al cove. If he can and it suits Catalonia, he will make the same agreement with the PP as with the PSOE: “If they are interested, they will go through the box.”
