He hadn't been well for a long time due to one of those damn diseases that weaken your defenses so that even a cold becomes a problem. However, he had not lowered his activity, despite the chronic leukemia. He no longer jogged, but he tried to keep fit, without forcing himself, with the gym equipment in his apartment in Madrid. In November he went to Japan for professional reasons and returned in a very poor condition. But, he again recovered. I have met him on a couple of occasions since then: the last one three weeks ago, at the meeting of the advisory board of La Vanguardia, and although he was almost voiceless, he forced his vocal cords to give us a brilliant lesson in geopolitics, although he was more prudent. with the Spanish reality. Perhaps because Alberto Núñez Feijóo had recovered it for his think tank and wanted to know more about his plans. They knew each other well with the former president of the Xunta, but also the hotelier Amancio López -a Galician settled in Barcelona- would seat them whenever he had the opportunity to sit at the table because he was a close friend of both of them and knew that they needed each other.
I met Josep Piqué forty years ago, when he was a general manager in the Department of Industry of the Generalitat. Later we had the opportunity to establish a friendship, as we met in a small urbanization in Urús (Cerdanya) where we spent our summers before he was a minister. We had shared unique moments in the Pyrenees, such as the day of the bombing of Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah during the 2001 Constitution Bridge, after a wave of attacks in Israel. The Piqué couple had dinner at our house and the landline phone did not stop ringing as soon as the first course arrived. I answered the ministry's call and handed the receiver to the minister, who dispatched with Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, or with Georges Papandreou, when Greece presided over the Council of the European Union. That day I could not work as a journalist, because the off-the-record friendship prevented me, but it was a lesson in foreign policy. In the years that we shared vacations in the mountains with our families, I had the opportunity to get to know Piqué very closely, who is one of the most interesting characters I have dealt with, not always understood. Neither for their own, nor for rivals. Those who knew him in the political and financial world attest to his intellectual stature. One of the anecdotes that we have remembered more than once was the day he wanted us to smoke some Cohibas that Fidel Castro had given him. I don't smoke and even less cigars, but it seemed to me that there are things that are worth trying in this life if only to keep it from being said: I caught a huge balloon. I was unable to accompany diners to dinner. Yellow and dizzy I had to lie down on the bed, while everything revolved around me as happened to Professor Tornasol in The Seven Crystal Balls.
I also had the opportunity to make more than one state trip with Josep Piqué. With José Maria Aznar, he was in charge of three ministries and even combined the position with the government spokesperson. I think he is the best spokesman any Spanish government has ever had. Serious, rigorous and truthful, few times who has held this position has achieved the general respect of the media. However, his passion was foreign policy. He wanted to modernize the embassies, turning them into platforms for economic development, and he launched the Asia Plan, in an attempt to put the emphasis of the Spanish business world on a then-emerging continent.
It has been said of Piqué that he had been a member of the PSUC, but I would swear that he never had a card, even though he had good friends in this world and sympathized with this universe. But Piqué was above all a liberal, perhaps the last in this country, who was not allowed to change like a sock by the Catalan PP when Aznar sent him on the risky mission of presiding over this party. It was a mistake that the nationalists did not seek their complicity in the approval of the Statute and that was paid dearly. Too much, seen with the distance of time.
Josep Piqué was also a great seducer. In a couple of lunches with Aznar, being president of the Cercle d'Economia, the popular leader understood that he needed him by his side. And he not only made him Minister of Industry, but also asked him to give him an accelerated master's degree in economics at Moncloa, where Ana Botella joined the session on more than one occasion. President Aznar had blind confidence in Piqué and thus he became a key figure in Spanish politics.
What he did not achieve was to change the drift of the PP. He would have liked to reach agreements with Unió Democràtica, to form the great party of the Catalan right. But, despite his excellent relationship with Josep Antoni Duran Lleida, the popular were not all like their new leader and this, among other reasons, made an agreement like the UPN's in Navarra impossible.
For Piqué, politics was a good investment, but a bad deal. To be a minister in 1996, he had to leave the presidency of Ercros, where he earned twelve times more than as a member of the Government. However, it was a good deal because he managed to have one of the best business and political agendas, with contacts all over the world. When he finally left the Catalan PP, he returned to the economic world where he has been president of Vueling or CEO of OHL, and where in recent years he has been a director of large companies such as Seat, Abengoa, Amadeus or Mapfre for international business.
For the rest, he has written numerous books in which he has expressed his vision of international politics. In one of them, The World to Come, published five years ago, he anticipates some of the problems that shake the planet. Especially interesting is the chapter dedicated to Russia, where he recalls the quote pronounced in 1939, at the beginning of World War II: "Russia is like a riddle wrapped in a mystery that is inside an enigma." And he advances the current crisis with Ukraine, warning that Putin has always defended that the popular revolt of the Maidan was an EU-sponsored coup, that Russia will never cede Crimea again and that for the West it is a strategic question to prevent Ukraine from return to Russian orbit. To conclude that for the Russians, St. Petersburg is the head and Moscow the heart of the country, but Kyiv is the soul, not in vain the Rusy, the historical population of Kievan Rus, come from it. So we face the most difficult of Sudoku puzzles.
