Sánchez exhibits the support of Felipe González in the CGPJ crisis

Not everything was flattery to the Government by Felipe González in the intervention that this Saturday he starred in Seville during the tribute organized by the PSOE to celebrate 40 years of his resounding victory in 1982. Far from it. But the former Prime Minister did show clear support for Pedro Sánchez on a crucial issue: the reproach against the Popular Party for having blown up this Thursday the negotiation to renew once and for all, after four years of tug-of-war, the General Council of the Power of attorney. “We have to remember that what identifies us as a country – he warned – is the package of citizenship, rights and obligations for all equally. If someone does not like a law, they have the right to change it, what they do not have the right to do is break it.

The message to Alberto Núñez Feijóo was subtle. González did not address him directly nor did he devote too many words to the matter in a speech that, moreover, and despite being the guest star, was relatively brief, much shorter than that of the chief executive. But if anyone had doubts about what he had meant, Sánchez himself took it upon himself to dispel them by extolling his main argument afterwards. «It is easy to understand: first, the law is fulfilled, but not first I skip it or condition it to I don’t know what. That – the veteran socialist had put forward – does not serve to stabilize democracy or improve coexistence ».

The words of someone who is today a political figure recognized by both a good part of the left and the right have a singular value. From the main opposition party, the idea has been encouraged that part of the PSOE, the barons and the old guard, sympathize with their refusal to agree on the renewal of the governing body of the judges as long as Sánchez maintains the intention of reforming the Penal Code to reduce the penalties for the crime of sedition.

Whether he likes this legal reform or not, designed to benefit those who were or may be convicted for their role in the Catalan independence challenge of 2017, González rejected that the Government’s plans can be used as a valid argument to ignore a constitutional mandate and to prolong a blockade that is having serious consequences in the Administration of Justice. Thousands of pending sentences are already accumulated in the judicial leadership, there are more than a dozen unfilled vacancies and more than fifty positions filled on an interim basis.

“Defeat of moderation”

The intervention of the former socialist president will not help the PP move a millimeter from its position, but it helps the PSOE in its electoral strategy. In the Government they are already preparing to face, between now and the May elections and, later, at the end of the year general elections, a fight without quarter with the popular ones. And they are determined to do everything possible so that the slam of the door in an issue that affects the third power of the State takes its toll on the image of a sensible and moderate leader with the Feijóo came to national politics last April, after the dismissal as leader of Pablo Casado’s PP.

“That political parties shamelessly fail to comply with the Constitution is the defeat of moderation and the triumph of extremism, because it deteriorates our democracy and coexistence,” he argued, along the lines of his predecessor, Sánchez. “It is not our case ; the defense and full compliance with the Constitution is our obligation and also our choice”, he continued with a reference to his support for the application of article 155 in Catalonia by the Executive of Mariano Rajoy.

Not everyone in the PSOE is clear that the rupture of an agreement that, as they insist, was “ready and prepared” to be signed this week, in the absence of few fringes, supposes the opposition leader any wear. Some understand that precisely theirs has been a decision measured in electoral terms. They believe that if he chose to blow it all up, it was because he calculated the cost of contributing to an operation that would mean overturning the majority of the Judicial Power Council and the Constitutional Court so that they pass into progressive hands, at a time when the Executive is willing to make gestures such as the aforementioned reform of the Penal Code and in which Esquerra presses for measures to be taken that produce effects similar to those of an amnesty for the inmates of the ‘procés’.

The same ones who, in the decision-making hard core of Ferraz and Moncloa, are convinced that they have succeeded with the strategy of accusing the former president of the Xunta de Galicia of “insolvency”, however, they believe they have found another vein. Above all, after it transpired that it was Isabel Díaz-Ayuso and other barons such as Juanma Moreno or Fernando López-Miras, they asked him to end a negotiation in which he seemed embarked on a sickle and a kick. The plan is now to present Feijóo as a weak leader unable to withstand internal or external pressure. “To the powers that have other parties trapped – Sánchez boasted – we say that the PSOE is an autonomous party that will always defend the majority”.