When I think about Anna Gabriel, what comes to mind is my female friends from the elite school in Barcelona's Eixample district where I studied my batxillerat, the post-16 qualification in Catalonia. That school is now semi-private but in my day it was one of the most expensive, most prestigious and most patriotic in the city. My female friends all had their hair like Gabriel, in the abertzale style typical of left-wing female Basque nationalists. They wore long-sleeved t-shirts under short-sleeved ones with drawings and slogans printed on them and listened to groups who sang things like "era un hombre, ahora es poli" (He was a man, now's he's a cop).
Sometimes, these friends would argue with their cheeks lit up with passion and would call me old-fashioned because I didn't fully agree with their communist ideas. Sometimes they would invite me to their houses and make me wash the dishes to show they were liberated. I don't know if they've voted for CUP. Some friends of both genders who then wanted the revolution lost hope over the years and fell away from politics.
Gabriel studied in a state school and has always defended them. When she was 16 years old she started to be active in the Plataforma Antifeixista (Antifascist Platform) and in Agrupament Roques Albes, a youth club in her town. From that moment she hasn't reduced her ideals even a jot. Her paternal grandfather emigrated from Huelva, in Andalusia, to work a mine in Sallent; her mother was born to a family in the town which had first-hand experience of the great moment of libertarian communism in Spain.
In 1934, during revolts by mine workers in Súria and Sallent, one of Gabriel's great-grandfathers went into the town square and burnt all his money, convinced that the capitalist system was on the point of disappearing. Irene Polo, one of the first female Catalan journalists, reported on the revolt, giving an idea of the poverty, the exploitation and the idealism which marked the lives of some towns around Catalonia in the last century. When Gabriel was young and being looked after by her grandmother from Murcia whilst her mother worked, the journalist was a heroine who made waves among Sallent's youth.
Gabriel is a professor of Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona with a degree in Social Education, but her family has seen poverty and cases of illiteracy, as well as political passion. The CUP deputy is the daughter of a tradition which was buried after the Spanish Civil War and which has re-emerged as the last layers of Francoism have broken with the imperfect transition to democracy.
Unlike some party colleagues, or some of those teenage friends, Gabriel's revolutionary spirit was learnt at home. Neither the t-shirts nor the ideas, nor that razor fringe which hardens her face, are a way to kill her parents, or to escape from some complex; they're an old family mandate. That gives her a consistency you can't learn or buy anywhere, and gives something beyond the fact she has forged her vocation from the ground up, which always gives for strength.
In 2002, Gabriel was part of CUP's founding core in Sallent. Between 2003 and 2007, she was a town councillor, as her mother had been in the times of PSUC, an old Catalan communist party, banned during the Franco era. In opposition, she fought with people from PSC and Convergència over the management of the mine's waste, which has a very important presence in the life of the town. She also learnt the extent to which fear of losing one's job influences political decisions and techniques.
In 2009 Gabriel resigned from CUP's national secretariat, despite being the candidate with the most votes, to "open a debate about internal democracy". Also at that time she renounced a job as a civil servant to not have to take time away from her dedication to the party and the town.
In 2013, after a decade in local politics, she went over to coordinating CUP's group in the Parliament. There she became familiar with how the Chamber works and saw from closer up how the game of politics is able to soften the convictions of the most committed characters, with all the media focus and pressures. For this work she had to put her academic career and her doctoral thesis to one side. But the sacrifice had its reward. In the 2015 election, Gabriel was put as the second name on CUP's electoral list behind Antonio Baños, who didn't take long resigning.
As leader of the parliamentary group, Gabriel immediately overwhelmed memories of the good legacies her predecessors had left to become the charismatic face of the CUP. The determination she showed to assert her party to prevent Artur Mas from becoming president again earned her many detractors, but set the bases for a prestige which, since that time, hasn't stopped growing. To the example of courage and coherence she has given from the beginning, in a country of politicians who can't withstand pressure, have to be added first-class, spontaneous, elegant and genuine oratory.
Respectful and learned in debates, Gabriel keeps her standards of the good manners appropriate of the most civilised capitalist societies much higher than many colleagues of her profession. This ability is important to maintain the leadership in a party like CUP, which has a great deliberative culture but which only gives in by conviction, never in the transactions which conventional parties make. It's also important in a political circus which tends to turn women into simple spokespeople of intransigent positions in the most adverse contexts.
I'm told that Gabriel has no personal ambitions, that she's never been above sweeping up in her town's community association. If I look at photographs of her, I see a classic woman of the country, with that maternal beauty of long-suffering and perfectionist Catalans, used to living without frills. I also see in her a politician with a strong wish for power in order to make changes, who has rid herself of the typical complexes of the country and who never makes a move which doesn't make sense for her path.
Without her Machiavellian toughness, the 1st October referendum wouldn't have been held. She was the first to talk about self-determination when other politicians were still speaking about the right to decide and nobody pushed Puigdemont more in promoting the referendum, when his Junts pel Sí needed CUP's support to pass its budget. It was to be predicted that the Spanish state would pursue her and it's also easy to foresee that she will defend herself like a lion, from her exile. Probably more forcefully and with more bad blood than Puigdemont. Rajoy has made himself a difficult enemy.