Anna Gabriel lives in a flatshare in a modest building tucked away in the bohemian Barcelona neighbourhood of Grácia. The first thing you see as you enter is a poster of Hugo Chávez, the late anti-capitalist leader of Venezuela, and a table stacked with political leaflets. The living room is small and spartan, devoid of books and personal objects. The humble surroundings are a world away from the sumptuous medieval palaces that house the Catalan president and his ministers. But there are many, not least inside the Spanish government, who believe that the rhythm and pace of Catalonia’s escalating conflict with Madrid are dictated not by the official Catalan leadership but by Ms Gabriel and her far-left separatist party. The Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP) holds just 10 of 135 seats in Catalan’s regional parliament, but without them President Carles Puigdemont has no majority to continue his separatist course. That has given the CUP and Ms Gabriel, the spokeswoman of the party’s parliamentary group, sweeping power to shape the political process. More often than not, they have used it to press for a hardline, confrontational stance that could culminate in a unilateral declaration of independence from Spain as early as next week. Ms Gabriel argues that there is simply “no alternative” to such a declaration, especially after the events surrounding Sunday’s independence referendum. The vote, which had been declared illegal by Spain’s constitutional court, was marred by violence after Spanish police tried to interrupt the voting process and confiscate ballot boxes. Madrid argues that its officers were defending the constitutional order against a de facto insurrection, but Ms Gabriel insists the intervention was a “savage and brutal attack against an entire people”. “Many people who were not in favour of independence now say that they no longer want to form part of a Spanish state that confronts political problems like this. In political terms, people are saying: is this what the Spanish state has to offer?”, she says. Spain, Ms Gabriel argues, is not only a state with “fascist roots” but also one that cannot acknowledge its own failure: “If you need so much brute force to defend the unity of the state, isn’t it evident that this unity does not exist?”
Catalonia’s far-left Popular Unity Candidacy does not have formal leaders. But it does have a face, and it is that of Ms Gabriel, the spokeswoman for the party’s group in the Catalan parliament. She hails from a leftwing family of miners in Sallent, north of Barcelona, and trained both as a teacher and a lawyer. Ms Gabriel belongs to the radical wing of what is already, by European standards, a radical party. The CUP describes itself as a “clearly socialist organisation with the objective of replacing the capitalist socio-economic model with a new model that is centred on the human collective and that respects the environment”. It opposes Catalan membership of Nato and of the EU. Ms Gabriel is a veteran activist who was part of an anti-fascist group in her youth before setting up a local CUP chapter in her hometown. Her greatest fear, she once told a Spanish interviewer, is that the “havoc created by the capitalist system will be irreversible”.
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Originally Posted by timosman
(can't think of a better place.)
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