PSOE and PP have easily obtained their votes this Tuesday, in the last plenary session of the season in Congresstheir pact to renew the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), the governing body of the judges; but no one has shown anything like satisfaction with this agreement in the debate. Quite the contrary. The PSOE, the party that heads the Government, stressed its “dismay” at the time lost to reach the pact: “Six years late in the face of the excuses of the PP.” The progressive partners of the Executive, including Sumar, which participates in the coalition, regretted that the socialists have opted to patch up the consensus with a PP that they accuse of benefiting from this blockage and the so-called judicial persecution against its political adversaries. The PP went further. Its general secretary, Cuca Gamarra, highlighted the “importance” of the day because, by starting this pact, “the end of Pedro Sánchez is closer” and accused the president of being “a predator of the rule of law.” The ten candidates (four jurists and six judges or magistrates) have been elected by 284 votes in favour.
The agreement to renew the General Council of the Judiciary, and to change the statute of the Public Prosecutor’s Office to prevent revolving doors from political positions, thus passed without pain or glory. Processing of the debate and approval in the plenary session of CongressThere was no enthusiasm. The 256 seats available to the PSOE and PP were more than enough this afternoon, at the end of the day, for the vote to go ahead, even with the 27 votes of Sumar, but there was not a single intervention in the entire debate that was spared all kinds of attacks on this final solution found, which was seen as a lesser evil for its promoters, the two main parties in the Chamber.
ERC, EH Bildu and the BNG have all announced that they will not participate in the vote and have stated in a joint statement that the pact between the PP and the PSOE “perpetuates the reactionary structures and dynamics of the 1978 regime.” The PNV has also left the chamber and will not vote on the election of the members.
The first to attack the agreement was the secretary general of Podemos, the former minister Ione Belarra, who warned the PSOE that it would “regret” having chosen to negotiate the distribution of the Judiciary with the PP, when “the judicial right has taken the president’s wife hostage”, in reference to the actions of Judge Juan Carlos Peinado regarding the professional activities of Begoña Gómez. Belarra again asked the socialists to rectify and break this agreement; which, according to her criteria, perpetuates the “impunity” of the persecution of a series of judges against political rivals. The spokesperson for the PNV, Mikel Legarda, also expressed his rejection of not having been consulted and of maintaining with this pact, by the PSOE and PP, “the distribution of ideologically similar people”. Criticisms very similar to those of the spokesperson for Junts or ERC.
Gerardo Pisarello, spokesperson for Sumar on this matter and member of the Chamber’s Board, linked all kinds of criticisms to the agreement with the PP, judicial and otherwise, compared to the alliances that he would have preferred with the progressive majority of the legislature. This parliamentarian also launched harsh invectives against the judicial right, José María Aznar, the FAES, the Ministry of the Interior of Fernando Grande-Marlaska, the “thieving” Bourbons, the coup d’état of 1936 and the Franco military regime.
In this climate, Vox spokesman Javier Ortega criticized the consummation of “cronyism” Pepesoe”. The far-right politician wanted to emphasise the discourse maintained by this far-right party, which claims that the PP and PSOE usually vote together. The agreed renewal of the CGPJ seems to Vox “an indecency and a disgrace” and even more so if it requires, “like the yokels”, the mediation of the European Union.
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The deputy in charge of defending the supposed virtues of the pact, Francisco Aranda, tried to avoid the most thorny aspects of this eternal negotiation with the PP and focused a lot on regretting that the party has made so many excuses to delay the solution, since the 20 members of the General Council of the Judiciary to be renewed have not had their mandate since 2018. Aranda stressed his “dismay at the lost time” and at “the loss of legitimacy and degradation” of the CGPJ itself.
The final flourish fell to the number two of the PP, Cuca Gamarra, in charge of negotiating the details of this pact with the Minister of Justice, Félix Bolaños. It did not seem at all like the presentation of an agreement, although Gamarra began by stressing that it was an “important day for democracy”. From there, she strung together such a torrent of reproaches, complaints and accusations that the virtues of what will be voted on this afternoon were nowhere to be seen. The PP spokesperson credited the agreement and stated that it will thus take “the first step towards ending 40 years of interference in the Judiciary”.
Gamarra admitted that this “starting point, not the end point” represents for the PP “a motion of censure on the policy of walls and blocks”, which she attributes to the Government of Pedro Sánchez. And there she linked the whole argument of attacks on the head of the Executive, after a small warning also to Vox, her former partner in several autonomous regions: “We prefer homologations with Europe than the dangerous friendships that you have been frequenting lately”. Then, the general secretary of the PP stressed that the pact “does not eliminate the role of Parliament, but rather limits it, but it does limit the misdeeds of this Government”. There she pointed out against “the revolving doors of Sanchezism”.
In this context of the theoretical agreement with the PSOE, the PP leader spoke of “the corruption of the president’s wife and her family circle”, of his “countless displays of despotism” and of the need to stop “defending areas of impunity for the private preserve of Sánchez’s family”. Gamarra ended by defining the head of the Executive as a “predator of the rule of law and its main threat”; and boasted that, with the agreement reached, her party “had made it as safe as possible for Spain not to be a failed country and for there to be a responsible and alternative opposition” that she labelled as “moderate and focused”. And she finished: “With the approval of this law, Sánchez’s end is ever closer”.
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