The cries of Fernando de Rosa reverberated in the Congress chamber on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after the agreement was announced in Brussels that put an end to more than five years of expired mandate of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ). The Valencian deputy of the PP’s speech exploded loudly from the first minute. “It is very satisfying to see how the socialist group has agreed to renew the CGPJ under the conditions that President Feijóo had established as non-negotiable at all times: independence of the Judiciary,” De Rosa exclaimed. He then went on the attack: “It was time for them to abandon that Francoist tic that presides over their political action, which is the colonization of the institutions by appointing addicts to the regime,” he concluded amid the jubilation of the popular bench and the socialist protests.
In Brussels, the deputy secretary of the PP Esteban González Pons had just congratulated himself on the fact that the agreement with the Government will make it possible to put an end to the “revolving doors” between justice and politics. To illustrate cases like this, Pons could hardly find a better example than that of his countryman, a former colleague in the Valencian Government and now in the popular group of Congress Fernando de Rosa. Because the same De Rosa who launched in the chamber, indignant and loudly, his diatribe against the Government for the “politicization of justice” has spent a good part of his career in a back-and-forth between politics and justice.
De Rosa (Valencia, 64 years old) was a member of the old Alianza Popular from a young age, a party in which he introduced the man who would later become regional president, Francisco Camps. At the same time he developed his career in the judiciary, which led him to serve as senior judge in Valencia. In 2003, with his friend Camps already president of the Generalitat, he was recruited as Secretary of Justice of the autonomous government. In the following legislature he was promoted to councillor. He was in office for just over a year, because the man who is now rebelling against the appointment of “addicts to the regime” of Pedro Sánchez was promoted in 2008 by the PP to member of the CGPJ at the suggestion of Camps.
This magistrate-politician who last Tuesday proclaimed in the hemicycle that “today in Spain the revolutionary thing is to talk about the independence of the Judiciary and democratic quality” rose to the vice-presidency of the Council and even held the presidency interim in 2012 after the resignation of the incumbent, Carlos Dívar, due to a scandal of improper payment of allowances. The De Rosa who deplores in Congress “the accusations of the Government against the judges” then starred in a strong controversy for attacking Baltasar Garzón when he was investigating the corruption of the PP. Regarding Camps, on the other hand, he only had good words: “Great president” and “absolutely honourable”.
In 2014, he left the CGPJ and returned to the judicial career, in which he was promoted to president of the Provincial Court of Valencia. Until he retraced his steps again. In 2019 he felt the call of politics again and was elected senator on the PP lists. In last year’s elections he moved from the upper house to the lower house, where he serves as vice president of the Justice Commission.
This permanent back-and-forth in the revolving door does not prevent De Rosa from feeling empowered to criticize behavior similar to his own, as long as it is the rival team. In a plenary session of the Senate, in July 2022, he described as “fraud” the appointments as attorney general of the State of Dolores Delgado and Álvaro García Ortiz, in the first case for having previously been a member of a Government, like him, and in the second for much less: participating in a round table on forest fires organized by the PSOE in Galicia. He dedicated the most abrupt part of his abrupt speech on Tuesday to García Ortiz. After accusing him of directing a “politicized entity,” he added: “He is an example of what is harmful, what is dirty, what is the sewer of this country.” Faced with that, he presented the PP as guarantor of the “independence of justice” and the “depoliticization of the Prosecutor’s Office.” “The Spanish must know that there is hope for regeneration,” he encouraged. The popular bench gave him a prolonged and enthusiastic ovation. De Rosa has declined to offer explanations for this report.
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