It is curious that you have to go back to 1873 to find the last Catalan who served as president of the government of Spain. Estanislau Figueras and Francesc Pi Margall were in 1873, one for 18 days and the other for 118 days. In order to locate someone who was truly one, that is to say, not a conjunctural formula but one who could design and execute a significant government action, it was General Joan Prim, who did not conclude his legislature when he was assassinated.
I had to see Josep Piqué on January 30 in Madrid together with the rector of the Abat Oliba CEU University of Barcelona, ​​Rafael RodrÃguez-Ponga. Our previous meeting had been in 2017, in a debate organized by a well-known think tank at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome. Talking to him, even from the days of the Betà nia-Patmos school, despite the difference in age, was always a delight.
Piqué always reminded me of Prim, even more than Josep Cambó and Miquel Roca. He had the ability to do everything he set out to do very well: a great economist, a brilliant businessman, an excellent minister and a perfect geostrategist. His work El mundo que nos viene (2018) should be analyzed by anyone who wants to give a well-founded opinion about the change in the era we are living. His analytical capacity came from a deep intelligence, observation skills, a reading career, a special critical sense and an observation capacity.
He was the closest thing to a Spanish Leonardo da Vinci and a perfect liberal. He dared to disagree with the mainstream, with what that entails, although his resilience made him emerge again and again with always brilliant ideas and an insatiable ability to work. However, as a rare bird in our country, he was humble, empathetic and grateful. He never had a dose, not the slightest, of envy or unhealthy ambition.
It was precisely this last characteristic that prevented him from accessing the presidency of the Government and being, like Prim, a Catalan involved in the governability of Spain and in the construction of a coexistence project that would go beyond such hackneyed words as “the implication” of Ortega or the “dret to decide” of the independence movement. He had, like Prim, the will to replicate the proactive Catalan character to the rest of the communities in Spain. And, like the general from Reus, the economist from Vilanova y la Geltrú had a clear vision of geopolitics and geoeconomics. Problems, in the hands of brilliant people, are opportunities.
I will greatly miss your weekly emails in which you provided a brief but in-depth analysis of the international situation. His prognosis, which I share, was to see that, rather than towards bipolarism, we were entering a phase of coexistence of various economically competitive powers but without a burden of values. In other words: pragmatism would prevail in the economic sphere without involving a Chinese or Indian way of life. Of course, he demanded for the European Union a common policy in more aspects if it wanted to continue to be significant and a clarification of values ​​that included recognizing the bases of European identity, which were partly substantiated by a Christian substrate that he respected but did not shared, with those of a changing society.
Our country today loses a lighthouse on the coast, a locomotive of ideas, a person of consensus and a person with a long-term vision.
