FRANCESC GAMBÚS BIOGRAPHY

My parliamentary work is mainly focus on the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, where I am a member of my group, and the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, where I am a substitute. I have also taken part in the Committee of Inquiry into Emission Measurements in the Automotive Sector (since Dieselgate) and I am a member of the parliamentary delegations for relations with the Mashreq countries (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria), the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean, the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly (the least developed countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific), and the Delegation for relations with the Maghreb countries and the Arab Maghreb Union.

I have a degree in Political Science and Administration, that I have studied in two stages at the Barcelona’s Autònoma University (UAB) and at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), for which I am licensed. I was educated in a Christian family and school environment. In my university period, I felt the need to give back to the community part of what the community had given to me. There were many things that my 20-year-old eyes didn’t assimilate, especially the fourth world poverty. The people of the Fundació Comtal, linked to La Salle brothers, helped me to see that situations with a nonconformist look.

For six years, from 1998 to 2004, I lived with Mireia, my wife, in Belgium, while I was working with Concepció Ferrer in the European Parliament. There were six intense years in which we lived in Leuven and Brussels, when our two eldest daughters were born. There I had the pleasure and the responsibility to preside for three years over the Catalan Casal of Brussels.

That period grew me professionally to start to work in the European institutions. I was working with the reunification of the Eastern countries in the European Union and the adjustment of the EU structures. In addition to that, I was working in development cooperation, that was not the subject that more hours of work took me, but, undoubtedly, it was the one that more satisfied me.

After a brief time working for the parliamentary group of Convergència i Unió in the Spanish Congress, I started to work in the Badalona’s Council, ​​managing the Department of Commerce and Consumption. There I learned the value of lifting the blind every morning, in a context of the beginning of the serious economic and monetary crisis that has affected us in recent years.

In March 2010, I was appointed director of the Institut d’Estudis Humanistics Miquel Coll i Alentorn (INEHCA), where I had done my degree practises more than ten years ago.

At the beginning of 2010, Unió Democràtica de Catalunya commend me to coordinate with Convergència Democràtica the preparation of the electoral programme for the national elections of autumn 2010 that gave us the responsibility to lead Catalonia.

In December 2010, I joined the Government of Catalonia as head of the Cabinet of the Vice-president and Minister of Government and Institutional Relations, Joana Ortega. In December 2011, I was appointed General Director of Foreign Affairs of the Government. I held that responsibility until the beginning of April 2014, when I stood for elections to the European Parliament on May 25, 2014.

My work, before and now, has allowed me to travel all over the world, to know cultures, religions, countries and people, and to consolidate my humanistic thinking.

After 21 years of affiliation in Unió Democràtica de Catalunya, on 27 April 2016, I decided to stop being a member and I explained the reasons in a public letter that you can find in my blog.

I am married to Mireia since 1999 and I am the father of three girls and one boy. My family is my essential pillar and we try to share as many moments as we can. I like reading and listening to music. In addition to that, I fiddle with an old guitar. Especially in summer, I try to go for a hike. In old times, I had climbed to the the Aneto, the Pica d’Estats and other great summits of our Pyrenees.