There is news that the candidate Alberto Núñez Feijóo offered at the investiture session. Yes, news. Which? It was when, a little more than 30 minutes after starting, after explaining that he wants to “govern by ensuring the independence of the institutions”, among which he cited the “National Intelligence Center (CNI)”, and reaching page 16 of his speech, spoke of General Council of the Judiciary. “And, of course, I do not want to control Justice. I do not. That is why I propose: to approve the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary at the same time that a law to reform the election model is registered in this chamber.” Although it does not appear in the text, he added verbally: “Let the judges choose the judges.”
Even if Feijóo became President of the Government, his proposal thus stated is unrealizable. The approval of a new election system requires processing time and its implementation – for the judges’ associations to propose their candidates to judges and magistrates throughout the country so that they in turn proceed to elect them – would take long months if not an entire year until the new members – there are 20 plus the president – take their positions. But the problem now, if a Government is formed, is Feijóo’s policy as head of the opposition – he has just been “invested” as maximum leader of the Popular Party, that is what, in reality, his peculiar anti-investiture was about -, namely; his intention to continue with the blocking the renewal of the CGPJ.
This coming Monday, October 2, the constitutional Court will dismiss, in all probability, the appeals of PP and Vox against the current law that prohibited a CGPJ in office from continuing to make appointments of judges and magistrates, applying the same constitutional norm that applies to a government or president in office and to a legislative branch. between two general elections, according to the judge’s presentation Maria Luisa Balaguer.
This CGPJ led by Lesmes – who resigned in 2022 – appointed when he could not do so – because it had expired – appointments of presidents of 17 expired Superior Courts of Justice, 50 of the provincial ones and dozens of judges of the Supreme Court. With the current law, then, what was already done was limited. And he could not follow his policy of designing a judiciary in the image and likeness of the conservative majority of a CGPJ elected in December 2013 for five years and which has now been in place for almost ten years.
Pedro Sánchez’s response
But the strategy exposed by Feijóo de continuing to block renewal will require a response in the event that Pedro Sánchez is sworn in as president and manages to form a coalition government. Because the PP’s politics are not peaceful. Unlike his predecessor Rafael Mozo, the new acting president simply because he is the oldest, Vicente Guilarte, he believes himself to be Carlos Lesmes. His attack on the Constitutional Court and its president on Sunday, September 24, coincidentally the same day that José María Aznar, based his interventions during the electoral campaign on bombarding the TC without complexes: “The message that the TC is giving to the citizens, where every issue with a certain political relevance is permanently resolved with a division of seven progressive magistrates against four conservatives, it is a devastating message. A jurist of the stature of the one who presides it [Cándido Conde-Pumpido] I should assume that it needs to be changed. Formulas should be sought to avoid it, because the 7-4 does a lot of damage to the credibility of the body and the system.”
a man like Guilarte, which has participated in the Lesmes-powered roller in the CGPJ between 2013 and 2022, has now discovered the existing division. And in keeping with the PP rally-act, he attacked the amnesty that same day: “The political amnesty that is being proposed is foreign to the general interest.” Guilarte, lawyer-director until last July of the Legal Department of the Property and Commercial Registrars of Spain, has formed since July 19 the apex of the troika of the strong men of the super-expired CGPJ, to which José María Mario joins Macias (partner of the Cuatrecases Gonçalves Pereira law firm since 2005) and Enrique Lucas (director of the Bilbao office of the Gómez-Acebo & Pombo law firm).
Next Monday, October 2, the members or vestiges of the 2013 CGPJ will know something that they already expected and that is that the TC will not “give them back” the power to continue making appointments. Actually, the verb return is inappropriate. Because it is an expired CGPJ who had been prohibited from exercising that power because he was in office. Which they used for almost two and a half years – until they were stopped – without raising any issues of conscience. All of these appointments, more than a hundred, should be challenged.
Sources from the acting Government already assume that if there is a new Government and Feijóo keeps his word to continue blocking the renewal until the establishment of a new election system – the election of the 12 judges of the CGPJ by the judges through the candidates presented by the associations– it will be necessary recover an organic law proposal from the Judiciarylater withdrawn from Congress, by which the 12 judges who must be part of the CGPJ could be elected without the need to respect the reinforced majority of 3/5 of the chamber established in current LOPJ. That would mean the partial renewal of the CGPJ.
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The eight jurists would remain pending (four for the Congress and four for the Senate) because unlike the 12 judges, it is the Constitution that establishes the 3/5 agreement. Therefore, it cannot be modified unless the Constitution is amended. But at least, the renewal of 12 members It would represent a step forward in the recovery and it would not be ruled out that if this is achieved, the resistance to the appointment of the eight jurists will lose ground.
Feijóo does not seem willing to abandon the use of judicial power and this one does not seem disinterested in undermining a new Sánchez Government, if it is formed, as it has already done with the previous one, from the trenches of the courts of justice (or injustice, depending on how you look at it).