I regret the death of César Alierta, a great Aragonese who, unlike other great heroes who presume to be such, he demonstrated it every time he was required to do so or on his own initiative. As a businessman, reached a great national and international dimension, with the presidency of Telefónica as a brilliant culmination. No countryman of ours has reached so high.
I dealt with him a lot in my eight years as President and I took great affection for him. I participated in the presentation of some of the awards and distinctions he received, in which I had the opportunity to praise him. At those moments, He always remembered Villanúa, the small Pyrenean town where he spent long periods of time since his childhood.and his wife, from whose death he never fully recovered.
In my conversations with him, recurring themes were his good relationship with Pope Francis, his efforts to digitize people in abandoned areas of Africa, his obsession with algorithms and artificial intelligence, which encouraged me to consider himself a politician, his bet on understanding between PP and the PSOE and the inevitable reference to a dinner with Angela Merkel, in which, in a way, she “read the letter to the chancellor.”
The last time he visited me, he dialed a number on his cell phone and, upon receiving the response, said: “Your Majesty, I’ll turn you over to the President of Aragon.” I picked it up and, to my surprise, who was speaking was Emeritus king The truth is that I couldn’t think of anything other than to ask him about his health and talk to him about the problems we had with the drought. He sarcastically answered that it was a drought in the place where he lived.
May the earth be light to this great Aragonese.
