On March 29, 2022, during the preparation of the Congress that was going to elect me as president of the Popular Party, I decided to create an external advisory body that would enrich our project. For almost a year I was frequently asked why the delay in materializing that idea was due and who was going to lead it, without my seeing fit to answer. Today I can do it because I no longer hurt the friend who accepted my offer to preside over the Fundación Reformismo 21, despite the fact that he never did it because for long months I waited for an improvement in his state of health that never came.
The conversation in which I expressly renounced appointing him as president never took place and was replaced by another in which he encouraged me to resolve the Foundation as it was finally done and guaranteed his help “however and wherever”.
We all have a cast of people who forge our character and our way of seeing life. It does not matter when they have appeared on the road, around them are the references that make us who we are. Josep Piqué will always be one of mine.
I began to admire him listening to his press conferences as government spokesman when I was president of Insalud, but it was several years later, campaigning together on the roads of Catalonia, that he captivated me as a politician and a friendship was also born that lasted until his last breath. While he practiced constitutionalist Catalanism in his land and I tried to defend Galicianism in mine, I began to realize that, beyond a few acronyms, we were united by something much deeper: that way of seeing Spain that prefers to build bridges between different sensibilities instead of consolidating walls.
Of all the praise that he will justly receive these days, I believe that one of the most deserved is precisely for having been the best interpreter of the values of the autonomous State, the one that refuses to make the Nation something monolithic with the same intensity that it opposes questioning the utility of the common project. Piqué did it with great intelligence and that is why today we can say that he was a good Spaniard because he was a good Catalan.
People often talk about the role that the fathers of the Constitution had in the consolidation of our democracy. However, the importance of the children who, after them, adequately managed that legacy, preserved the spirit of the Transition and were always loyal to its principles, tends to be minimized. In the future, this continued effort from generation to generation will have to be recognized with greater intensity and Piqué will be included as one of its main supporters.
Like many citizens, the man who left us yesterday was deeply concerned about the drift of our country. As he always did since we met, also in the last year he generously conveyed multiple opinions about the future to me and, as a result, I was able to verify that, despite having left public life in 2007, politics had not abandoned him. . He preserved intact a broad knowledge, but above all a deep vocation for consensus and seriousness in the face of the fracture and frivolity that governs us today.
Without any doubt, Josep Piqué had nothing to do with the substance or with the form that has been installed in the majority of institutions today. He was closeness versus distance with respect to those who think differently, general interest versus individual or personal interest, dialogue versus imposition, profound message versus empty content, an example of public service versus behavior that dishonors the exercise of politics. .
Whoever deduces from this that his legacy belongs to the old-fashioned way, I think he is wrong. There is a type of discourse that little by little is running out, based on the conflict for the sake of the conflict, not on the controversy whose purpose is to achieve a solution. Josep Piqué's legacy is fully current because he proposes to break the Gordian knot of confrontation to find paths along which we can walk together.
In the understanding he was happy and it showed. It is a recipe that he knew how to apply both to national and Catalan politics, as well as to geopolitics, a chapter that he mastered managing his great experience, his vast historical knowledge and his prodigious intuition to capture the great changes.
Piqué participated as a founding member in the first meeting of the Fundación Reformismo 21 that began a few weeks ago. He intervened several times with a small voice that made his physical weakness undeniable, and yet his great strength and courage prevailed before all those present. I remember that I thought that, if in the end he had not been able to be the president of this body, perhaps it was because this political era was too small for a guy like him. Indeed, he did not lead the Foundation, but his ideology and the ways in which he defended it until the end of his days will.
As his beloved Gloria, his children and all of us who loved him will do, I too must now get used to continuing the journey without his advice. I know that he was well aware that his affection and support were key to me and for this I thank him so much that in the last messages he sent me he conveyed to me with great certainty that the PP was going to win the next general elections "without a doubt". .
I say goodbye to a figure of the Popular Party. I say goodbye to a free Spaniard who did not allow his thoughts to be imprisoned in dogmas. I say goodbye to the man who taught me to love and admire what is Catalan regardless of prejudice and stereotypes. I say goodbye to those who had joined the purpose of thinking together about the great reforms that our country needs. And despite the sadness that this produces, I can't help but also feel happy because I still feel like I'm on his team. Let us remember that he militated, above all, in understanding and harmony.
Goodbye, dear friend.
