Almost four years too many have been in office General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) due to the lack of agreement between the two major parties. True, the PP had always been ‘sluggish’ when it came to renewing it when the balance in the Council was favorable and it did not have a parliamentary majority, but this time the delay -with varied arguments- is being as long as it is difficult to justify.
In spring it seemed that the relay of Paul Married by the pragmatist Nunez Feijoo would change things. But right away there were the Andalusian elections and then nothing at all. The renewal was still stuck and the problem was poisoned because the ban on the acting CGPJ from appointing Supreme Court magistrates (the PSOE’s failed and arrogant law to force change) had aggravated everything. The many vacancies due to retirement in the Supreme Court hindered the work of the high court and the legal ‘impasse’ (the Constitution orders that the CGPJ be renewed every four years) and functional was so strong that Carlos Lesmes, the conservative president of the CGPJ and the Supreme Court, threatened to resign at the opening of the judicial year. And since the Council was not renewed, Lesmes, who was a high position in the Aznar governments, ended up resigning on October 9, but not before having irritated the conservative judges.
The scandal in the judicial world and in Europe was enormous and the PP and the PSOE were forced to negotiate seriously. The situation was not sustainable and at the beginning of the week it seemed that the agreement between the minister Bolanos and the MEP Gonzalez Pons, very close to Feijóo, was almost done. And so they assured it both in Moncloa and in Genoa.
But it has not been that way. On Thursday, Ángela Martialay, expert editor of ‘El Mundo’, opened the front page of the newspaper with a big headline: ‘The PP fears the reaction of “the political, judicial and media right-wing”’ to the pact with the PSOE to renew the CGPJ. According to the article, the talks had been carried out successfully and “from Genoa they do not understand that any agreement with Pedro Sánchez is criticized with the argument that Sánchez is not trustworthy. That is pure Trumpism & rdquor ;.
There must have been something because on the same Thursday at the last minute and after a telephone conversation with Sánchez (who was in an African airport) Núñez Feijóo announced that the pact was frozen because Sánchez wanted to lower, according to ERC, the penalties for the crime of sedition, which could benefit Puigdemont and Marta Rovira. But one thing is the pact on the CGPJ, a constitutional obligation, and another, different, the future laws of the Government that also depend on difficult parliamentary votes. is the new excuse because Sánchez had already announced long before that he was in favor of that reform. But the sedition and a verbal slip in Congress by María Jesus Montero, Minister of Finance and Deputy Secretary General of the PSOE, must have heated things up.
Feijóo has believed that, with the reform of the crime of sedition in the headlines, the agreement with Sánchez would entail more internal troubles and electoral risks than advantages
What happened so that in less than 24 hours an almost concluded pact fell apart? The first answer is in the headline of ‘El Mundo’ itself. The Trumpism of “the political, judicial and media right & rdquor; Has been imposed. Who is that triple and anonymous right? We don’t know, but on Friday Pilar Santos gave a piece of information in EL PERIÓDICO: Isabel Díaz Ayuso had asked Feijóo not to sign the CGPJ pact. And there are analysts who maintain that important sectors of the PP have never wanted to renew a CGPJ and a Constitutional Court elected when they had a majority.
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Perhaps everything is more anodyne. Feijóo is a functional pragmatist. He wants all the votes of the right (like Aznar in 2000 and Rajoy in 2011) to win the PSOE without being too much a prisoner of anyone. now from abascal. And perhaps in the end he has thought that agreeing the CGPJ with Sánchez, which put an end to a constitutional anomaly and reinforced his credibility before the center and before Europe, would have more internal costs and electoral risks than political advantages.
Okay, we will continue without a new Council of the Judiciary. The only thing that counts is that there is no swell in the PP and that the right-wing vote is not distracted by other acronyms? Does the leader of the PP believe that it is only collateral damage that it seems that he has not wanted to confront the trumpism of Ayuso and others?