Gabriel Rufián is so eager to show his origins that he looked for a significant place yesterday in Santa Coloma de Gramenet to play with his ideas. The city has marked it, and the Institut Puig Castellar, even more so. A center where his mother and aunts studied and where they later worked for an underground sewing workshop, in the eighties and nineties. Fine leather.
Many teachers from this institute ended up at PSUC in the 1970s and 1980s, a formation of which Oriol Junqueras once again declared himself heir. The red belt is not called red because the PSC wins there, he reasoned, but because the PSUC used to win there years ago. "They were the real leftists and today we represent them ERC. We are the true reds", he cried.
With this entry, Rufián, yesterday in a white shirt, but with a redder heart than "independenceist xarnego" - with seven arms and raised fists in the campaign logo - claimed his roots and his ideology.
He focused on unraveling a series of commitments he intends for the city where he grew up, long before he could practice his parodied "blue steel look". He got rid of the star. Don't play now. "We make sacks from the flags and fill them with content; let's talk about what we share: precariousness, misery, unemployment, feminist struggle and the environment", she went on to say. "The only ideology and flag will be that of the City Council".
So he made a whole string of promises pivoting on the axes of education, family and work, in addition to cleanliness and security: 40 more local police, millionaire investments for all levels of education, 800,000 euros for to the reinforcement of English (it is the second city in southern Europe with the lowest level, he said), the archival second residence, etc.
To claim, let it not remain, and he also appealed to historical facts, of pride of the working and humble class, such as the hijacking of buses on line 230, on June 6 and 7, 1977. An action to claim the connection with Barcelona, a year before the best-known action in Torre Baró. Rufián, as a child, wanted to be a bus driver.
An electoral campaign in Santa Coloma would never have caught the attention of the media had it not been for the inclusion of Rufián as mayor of Esquerra. The victory of the PSC in the city is indisputable. It has governed there for 32 years, 14 of which with Núria Parlón at the helm. But the republican does not aspire to win the mayor's office. Junqueras' task is another: to dig a hole in an area, the metropolitan area of Barcelona, which until a few years ago was Comanche territory for ERC. And in return, that he spearhead the representation of ERC throughout the red belt.
