The confrontation between the Government and the PP due to the constitutional crisis that Spanish democracy is experiencing does not seem to be going back and the parties are entering the terrain of the unknown, after the Constitutional Court (TC) yesterday paralyzed the processing of the amendments to the reform of the Criminal Code to facilitate the renewal of the highest interpreter of the Constitution.
The decision of the TC, far from acting as a turning point to make the parties reflect, has achieved the opposite: to establish the positions of each one. Thus, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has raised the shot. If the reform whose processing has been suspended by the TC should serve to unblock the renewal of this court, four of whose magistrates saw their mandate expire in June, the head of the Executive now intends to direct his energies to the root of the problem, which is none other than the renewal of the CGPJ, whose mandate expired more than four years ago. Attempts to tackle it have been ruined by the constant blocking exercised by the PP with an innumerable list of motivations. Sánchez wants to put an end to this blockade and with this objective he has announced measures but without giving any details. Of course, complying with the ruling of the TC and the Constitution.
On the other hand, the PP already assumes that there will be no renewal of the governing body of the judges and the TC in this legislature unless Sánchez renounces the abolition of the crime of sedition and the reduction of penalties for embezzlement, and a reform of the law of the Judiciary that depoliticizes both the Council and the guarantee court, conditions that the popular leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has raised after the appearance of the head of the Executive and knowing that he is not going to comply.
"The Government, how can it be otherwise, although we do not share the decision, we abide by the resolution adopted yesterday by the current conservative majority of the Constitutional Court", Pedro Sánchez assumed, in the institutional statement that he carried out this Tuesday from the Moncloa . “And also, in accordance with the law and the Constitution, the Government will adopt whatever measures are necessary to put an end to the unjustifiable blockade of the Judiciary and the Constitutional Court. And consequently, so that the Constitution and the popular will expressed in the 2019 general elections are respected”, the President of the Government warned in an institutional statement.
Shortly after, in the press conference after the Council of Ministers, the minister spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez, has refused to advance what steps the Government is going to take or what reforms it is going to undertake to proceed to unblock the renewal of the CGPJ. The first thing, the spokeswoman has indicated, will be to analyze the resolution of the TC, which she has described as "controversial", and also the particular votes of the members of the progressive wing. Executive sources, however, specify that the following decisions adopted by the Government will take place in a few days, although without specifying whether before the end of the year or not.
One possibility to achieve this would be to resume the idea of reforming the CGPJ law to change the majorities necessary for its renewal and bypass the PP, which would in turn allow the rest of the appointments to be unblocked in other judicial instances, such as the Supreme Court -now blocked by law- or the same TC. The Executive already flirted with this possibility in the past to put pressure on the PP and reach an agreement, but finally rejected it due to the warnings against it that came from the European Commission.
In this sense, the groups that make up the majority that support the Government have made themselves available to the initiatives that it adopts to reverse the blockade of the judicial and constitutional bodies. This Tuesday in Congress, the spokesperson for EH-Bildu, Mertxe Aizpurua, the spokesman for Esquerra, Gabriel Rufián, and the spokesman for Más país, Íñigo Errejón, said they were waiting for the Executive's initiatives, who were a priori willing to legislate to end the current appointment regime that allows the PP to keep the high judicial magistracies and the guarantee court blocked.
In any case, the Government does not admit criticism or self-criticism about the reform that it has attempted via amendments. Rodríguez, when asked if the Executive recognizes any error in its strategy, has affirmed that the error is to block the CGPJ and has added that recovering institutional normality means that "there are those who do not break normal institutional relations and compliance with the Constitution" transferring all responsibility to the PP and Feijóo, whom the Minister of Justice, Pilar Llop, has accused of keeping the judiciary hostage and even boasting about it.
And it is that Feijóo had appeared after Sánchez to charge against the criticisms leveled against the TC, which, as he assured, was limited to "defending" democracy and accused Sánchez of having "copied" the style of doing politics of the independence movement as the "disqualifications of State bodies, the exclusion of the opposition from any important decision-making process, or the postponement of parliament through shortcuts to avoid democratic controls." In his opinion, the Constitutional Court "has not prevented a parliamentary debate" but "has guaranteed it", because it has stopped the "cacicada" that involved processing the reform urgently and without first receiving the reports from the constitutional bodies.
For his part, the president of Vox, Santiago Abascal, has announced that next Friday his parliamentary group will present a criminal complaint for "conspiracy to commit a crime" before the Supreme Court against the Prime Minister for the reform of the Penal Code that eliminates the crime of sedition and reform that of embezzlement, which will foreseeably see the final green light on Thursday in the Senate.
For Vox, the court of constitutional guarantees has only ruled "on a violation of the procedures" for "violating the rights of parliamentarians", but Abascal points out that the most serious thing is the part that continues its processing, for which he considers that " the blow against coexistence, against the rule of law and against the Constitution has not stopped" and describes the reform of the Penal Code as "the most serious attack that the Constitution has suffered". Abascal has accused Sánchez of "assaulting" the separation of powers and of agreeing with "some criminals convicted and or on the run for impunity for their crimes", alluding to the leaders of the process, and "guarantees impunity to commit crimes again ".
