It was a proposal that the PP had been maturing: the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, should withdraw from the negotiation for the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ). The popular ones blame him for the fact that the talks did not advance.
But the events of recent days in which the PP leadership sees a smear campaign against Alberto Núñez Feijóo organized by the Presidency have broken the camel's back and have led Genoa to the conclusion that it must ask the Government for a change of interlocutor. And not only for the renewal of the governing body of the judges, but for everything they have to talk about. Bolaños "is burnt out" as a negotiator, say sources from the popular leadership.
And it is that relations with Bolaños are dead. If the talks were paralyzed in July after the socialist group brought a proposal to Congress to return to the CGPJ the competence to appoint the members of the Constitutional Court, the latest statements by the Minister of the Presidency, who has accused Feijóo of lying, have put the talks at an impasse.
In the Popular Party, a name was pointed out, Patxi López, as a possible interlocutor, "although since he was appointed he has not stopped messing with us," they admit in the party's leadership.
The election of the new spokesperson for the socialist group in Congress is justified by the interest of the PP that the negotiation be framed in the Cortes, which, in accordance with the Constitution, is the competent institution for the election of part of the members of the Judiciary and the Constitutional Court.
To this they add the capacity for dialogue of the new PSOE spokesman in Congress, whom, they remember, the PP voted to be lehendakari.
For the PP, the leaking of the document signed by the previous leadership of the party is a malicious act that aims to undermine and discredit Feijóo in the eyes of his supporters, propitiating a confrontation between the new and the old leadership.
In the party they assure that this confrontation does not exist. However, it is true that on account of the secret document that Feijóo assures that he did not know, there have been discrepancies between members of Casado's leadership and Feijóo's. The one who was deputy secretary of communication, Pablo Montesinos, assured that there was an exemplary transfer of powers and that Casado's indication was not to hide anything, for which he doubts that the then general secretary, Teodoro García Egea, did not inform Esteban González Pons in the meetings they held for the succession.
García Egea does not want to specify whether or not he reported the existence of these agreements, and sources close to González Pons insist that he only met him on April 27, when Bolaños put it on the table at a meeting along with other "hidden agreements" .
The leadership of the PP downplays this issue because from the beginning, they say, they told the government that they did not feel bound by any secret pact.
Sources from Casado's management assure that it is true, as Feijóo said, that the agreement was not reported in the management committee, because it was a discreet negotiation "that was carried out from above".
The same sources assure that at that meeting on April 27, Bolaños also told them about other "secret agreements" that they did not endorse either. These would commit both parties to having Conde Pumpido preside over the Constitutional Court; Pilar Teso, the CGPJ and the Supreme Court, and that José Ricardo de Prada enter the Council as a jurist of recognized prestige. De Prada is the judge who issued the sentence on the first part of the Gürtel case that condemned the PP to pay a fine of 245,000 euros as a lucrative participant in the corrupt plot. It was the sentence that caused the motion of censure that ended the government of Mariano Rajoy. In exchange, the controversial jurist Enrique Arnaldo could continue to be a magistrate of the Constitutional Court, according to sources from the PP.
