Speaker Bio
Carles Campuzano i Canadés (Barcelona, 12 July 1964) is a Catalan politician. Catalan Minister of Social Rights since October 2022.
Graduate in Law, between 1986 and 1992 he worked in the Ministry of the Presidency of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
He was a councillor on Vilanova i la Geltrú Town Council (the town where he has lived since 1969) for the nationalist coalition party Convergència i Unió (Convergence and Union, CiU) in 1987-1992. He was a member of the Regional Council of Garraf in 1991-1992 and, in the 1992 elections to the Catalan Parliament, he was elected deputy.
He was also a secretary general of the Nationalist Youth of Catalonia in 1989-1994, as well as chairperson since 1994, and founder of the National Federation of Students of Catalonia (FNEC) and of Nationalist Students. He was also a member of the National Council of the nationalist party Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (Democratic Convergence of Catalonia, CDC) since 1985.
In the Spanish general elections of 1996, he was elected deputy for the constituency of Barcelona, a position he has repeated in the Spanish general elections of 2000, 2004, 2008, 2011 and 2016. He was spokesperson for the Commission for Labour and Social Affairs in the Spanish Congress of Deputies and chairperson of the Commission for Integral Disability Policies.
He was also a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
In CDC, he was a member of the National Executive Committee and a member of the board of trustees of the CatDem Foundation. Within the political space of CDC, he always defended social-democratic postulates.
He opened his blog in September 2006, and joined Facebook and Twitter for the 2008 Spanish election campaign. He then opened channels on YouTube and Vimeo, and accounts on LinkedIn and Instagram. In December 2013, he was elected Deputy 2.0 at the annual awards given by the Association of Parliamentary Journalists of Madrid.
In June 2016, he participated in the founding congress of the Partit Demòcrata Europeu Català (Catalan European Democratic Party, PDeCAT), for which he was spokesperson in the Congress of Deputies from March 2017 until 2019.
After two decades as a member of the Congress of Deputies, in the summer of 2019 he left politics to work in the social field as director of Dincat, the federation of organisations for the defence of the rights of people with intellectual disabilities in Catalonia.
In 2020, he resigned from PDeCAT.
At the same time as he was the director of Dincat, Campuzano held also the chairpersonship of the ACSAR Foundation (Catalan Association for Solidarity and Aid to Refugees) and was a member of the Advisory Councils of the Catalan Esplai Foundation, the Observatory of the Third Sector and the Training and Work Foundation, the student organisation Deba-t, the public advocacy firm BeBartlet and the consultancy firm Llorente y Cuenca.
At the same time, he was also secretary of the board of directors of the Third Sector Board, and vice-chairperson of Cocarmi (Catalan Committee of Representatives of People with Disabilities), among other social entities.
In 2022, he was one of the founding members and chairperson of the association Catalan Action for Catalanist Debate, intended to keep the Catalan nationalist debate alive after the years of the pro-independence process. That October, President Pere Aragonès offered him to join the Catalan government as Minister of Social Rights, after the departure of Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia) from the Executive.
He is the author of the book Reimaginem la independència: Un projecte vàlid per a tothom (Reimagining independence: A project that works for everyone) and of Cataluña, una desconexión anunciada (Catalonia, a disconnection foretold), a collection of articles published in the newsweekly El Siglo. He also published a book of conversations with the journalist Pere Gendrau, El patriotisme a peu de carrer (Patriotism on the streets) and has collaborated in collective works such as the book Per la bona política. Propostes per a la regeneració democràtica (For good politics. Proposals for democratic regeneration)