The Constitutional Court endorses the legal reform that allowed its last partial renewal and facilitated the progressive majority

The Constitutional Court has rejected the PP’s appeal against the 2022 legal reform that circumvented the effects of the blockade of the Council of the Judiciary to facilitate the last partial renewal of the guarantee court. The majority of the plenary session has dismissed the allegations of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s party against the modification that allowed the CGPJ to appoint two Constitutional magistrates despite the fact that, at that time, another previous reform prevented it from making appointments due to its mandate having expired. It was the renewal of four justices that reversed the court’s arithmetic and imposed a progressive majority unprecedented in more than a decade.

According to court sources telling elDiario.es, the plenary session has made the decision with one vote against, that of the magistrate and former member of the Council, José María Macías. Two of the judges in favor of dismissing the appeal have announced concurrent private votes. César Tolosa and María Luisa Segoviano, two former judges of the Supreme Court who were appointed to the Constitutional Court thanks to this reform, have abstained from participating in these deliberations.

The Government launched several legal initiatives between 2021 and 2022 to overcome the effects of the blockade perpetrated by the PP to not renew the General Council of the Judiciary, with the mandate having expired since the end of 2018. A first measure in mid-2021 was to prevent that the governing body of the judges could make appointments to the judicial leadership and the Supreme Court while their mandate had expired. A year later, the time came to partially renew the Constitutional Court, and it was the turn of the Government and the CGPJ to each appoint two magistrates.

This partial renewal became a key moment for the future of the guarantee court: this renewal of four members would imply, in practice, a progressive majority for the next nine years. The executive then decided to modify the Organic Law of the Judiciary to introduce an exception to the CGPJ’s prohibition on making appointments and allow it to appoint its two magistrates.

That renewal did not come immediately after this lifting of the veto on making appointments. Negotiations within the CGPJ became acrimonious when the conservative sector of the members refused to endorse the progressive candidate: José Manuel Bandrés. Weeks of negotiations ended with César Tolosa and María Luisa Segoviano in the Constitutional Court, also leaving an unprecedented institutional conflict: the conservative majority that then prevailed in the court paralyzed the parliamentary processing of a new reform with which the Government intended to overcome the blockade of the Conservatives of the Judiciary.