Alberto Santacruz |
Merida (EFE) .
“I have very internalized anger. He is permanently angry ”, the chief executive reiterated in an interview with EFE in which he has analyzed both this legislature that is now ending and the keys that should mark the future of the region.
Although the central government has invested 1,700 million euros in the high-performance rail network of Extremadura and has improved the conventional network, Extremadura is aware that there are still a few years to complete the AVE line to Madrid, regardless of the incidents that are registered in rail service.
Faced with those who accuse him of not being very vindicative of the central government, as the PP has criticized, Fernández Vara has pointed out that in the face of the “punch on the table”, which is how things were done -he added- at the end of the XX century, there is “the work and the daily effort”.
“The easy thing is to get in front of a microphone and give voices. Another thing is to get up first thing in the morning, go to Madrid and not return until you have solved the problem ”, she added. An attitude that Extremadura, by way of example, has allowed it to receive 300 of the 750 million euros from the Aid Fund for Productive Investment 2022 for the entire national territory.
In his opinion, the current “demand” is “money for investment, which is what generates employment, good salaries and good pensions tomorrow.”
Apart from rail transport, Fernández Vara has recognized that the most difficult moments in this legislature were when Covid-19 took the lives of around twenty people a day in this autonomous community. “I have a traumatic sequel to that; being in charge of a region where people are dying every day… you don’t recover”, he added.
“There were times when I sincerely considered it (…) I could not be 100% in charge of an autonomous community if I was so emotionally affected,” he acknowledged when asked if he ever thought of stepping aside.
“Time helps and allows you to recover… when I saw that I was in perfect condition to assume all the responsibilities, I decided to continue”, he pointed out.
During the interview, Fernández Vara highlighted the significant number of business projects that have arrived in Extremadura in recent years, such as the Navalmoral de la Mata battery gigafactory, the diamond factory for use as semiconductors in Trujillo and the new high-end tourist accommodation, among others.
Although he has indicated that between 2017 and 2019 projects began to arrive in this autonomous community “at a different rate” than that registered until then, Fernández Vara considers that the pandemic “accelerated everything” and that the war in Ukraine, one of the backgrounds of which is the energetic, “has precipitated everything”.
The focus is, as he has remarked, on the production of clean energy and green industry, and “Extremadura has positioned itself as a benchmark for many companies”, since it has solar potential, water (the region with the greatest capacity to dam ) and “the most avant-garde legislation in Spain in administrative simplification”.
“Companies don’t come by chance. They are looking for cheaper energy and we promise that they will have the papers in five months”. “We are in a phase in which projects to manufacture components for the energy sector are coming up”, and in the field of hydrogen”, he added.
For all these reasons, Fernández Vara understands that this must be “Extremadura’s commitment for the next four years”, among other reasons so that “the future of this land does not depend on the goodwill of others towards us, that our future depends of us”.
Likewise, it recognizes that education from a labor perspective, such as Vocational Training (FP), both regulated and non-regulated, must play a fundamental role in responding to the new production model.
“There are companies that the first thing they ask is not the money (aid) that we are going to give them, it is whether we have enough professionals” in certain specialties”.