Socialists and popular shield their conversations in search of a way out that avoids their dissent on the method of election of the CGPJ and saves their faces
In a time conducive to confusion, Spanish politics is preparing to close a singularly strange week while waiting for how the third duel in the sun between Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo unfolds this Tuesday in the Senate and, above all, whether the Chief Executive and the leader of the opposition successfully consummate that “last chance” that they have been granted to save what is theirs. Or what is the same: the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) pending since December 4, 2018, when the five-year term of the 20 members of the governing body of the judges expired with Sánchez already in office. Moncloa.
These days have been strange not only because of the institutional upheaval caused by the calculated and personal decision of Carlos Lesmes to resign from the presidency of the Council to stage his fed up and because of the emergency summit in Moncloa, barely 14 hours later, to which Sánchez and Feijóo were forced. The novelty comes from this new dialogue within – “constructive”, the popular define it – and from silence towards the outside.
muted conversations
The bell and the elephant
In a communion of interests that only has a precedent this legislature -when Sánchez and Casado agreed to the cheetah by keeping silent about the partial relief in the Constitutional Court and the Ombudsman-, the Government and the PP act these days with the slogan of not telegraphing in the press your conversations and avoid outbursts. The two negotiators – Minister Bolaños and MEP González Pons – have shielded their contacts under a bell to try to reach an agreement that was impossible until now.
But that niche of discretion to dampen dissent competes with a double elephant in the room: the divergence on a change in the Council’s election system -which returned Sánchez and Feijóo to the heat of the debate in the huddles on October 12- and the need for socialists and popular to find a pact formula that allows both to save their positions.
current advice
possible renewal
Some and others insist that the priority -the replacement of the twenty members who between mandate and extension have spent almost a decade on the Council- can be unlocked as soon as the rival gives in. Which means, for Sánchez, that Feijóo must comply not only with constitutional requirements, but also assume that this CGPJ must reflect the progressive majority now embodied in the Cortes. According to the seven-page proposal sent to Moncloa in July, Feijóo is willing to renew, but starting to ‘clean’ and appoint the vice of politicization and under the premise of a written commitment to launch the reform in six months so that the judges are chosen by the judges. Something to which the president refuses.
In the absence of just one year of legislature, the way to save the appointment mechanism may lie in getting the debate rolling
Like the socialists, Feijóo’s party carries penance in sin. Suffice it to recall the example of Lesmes, linked in his day to the Administration governed by Aznar. Both parties seem ready for a first amendment by way of agreeing that all appointments to the Council and its weighty government decisions require a three-fifths majority. Which means that nothing could be done in the future without consensus, diluting the ‘bloquism’ between conservatives and progressives.
The designation system
More or less judicial weight
The Government of Sánchez has closed ranks with the method that, anchored in the constitutional provisions and in the Organic Law of the Judiciary, foresees that the Congress and the Senate elect the 20 members (twelve between judges and magistrates and eight between jurists of recognized capacity) by a three-fifths qualified majority. An election mechanism that the Executive opposes to the greater “weight” that Feijóo wants to grant to the judges in the appointments that concern them, in line with what the European Commission advocates.
The popular ones treasured the necessary hegemony in the Cortes with Mariano Rajoy for the legislative turnaround, but they did not do it. Now they propose that the renewed Council prepare a report on its own reform within a maximum period of six months, which would then be substantiated in a bill for debate and eventual agreement in Congress. There is only one year left in the legislature. Hence, the way out can be in the jurisdiction – to start rolling the possibility of change – and not so much in the egg of the immediate.
The 51 candidates who have been fallow for four years
At the end of September 2018, two months before the mandate of the current CGPJ expired, Carlos Lesmes sent to Congress and the Senate the 51 candidates for the twelve members of the bodies corresponding to judges and magistrates.
That fifty applicants for the judicial shift represented the four professional associations or had no corporate affiliation. The Government, now against the criteria of the PP, understands that this mechanism already guarantees the intervention of the Magistracy in the appointments of its Governing Council.
Four years later, those candidates still have no one to choose them. But with everything, the most visible stone in the negotiating path between PSOE and PP was not in that list, but in that of the eight jurists with proven track records who directly appoint Congress and Senate.
The popular vetoed José Ricardo de Prada, the magistrate of the conviction of the ‘Gürtel case’ whose candidacy promoted United We Can. Feijóo’s plan proposes that the list of the Courts does not include practicing judges.
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