No signs of an upcoming agreement. This is how sources from the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) define the forecast of the meeting that is being held today between the interlocutors of the conservative and progressive blockade to look for two candidates to be elected magistrates of the Constitutional Court. The six members appointed to reach an agreement in the names of the guarantee body do not expect that after today's meeting an agreement will be reached to be able to take it to a plenary vote.
Sources from the organ explain that the Conservatives still have not closed their list of candidates for it to be analyzed by the other bloc. This is not the case with the progressives, who after last week's meeting already provided a list with nine names and whose resumes have been sent to the CGPJ for analysis. The law set September 13 as the deadline for the body of judges to appoint two magistrates of the TC, so that the Government would do so in turn and be able to renew a third of the court, which is already in office.
These same sources explain that the Conservatives want to buy time to achieve an agreement between the PSOE and the PP beforehand and renew the Council itself, which has been in office for almost four years.
They believe that the visit of the Commissioner for Justice of the European Union, Didier Reynders, who plans to meet with the ministers Félix Bolaños and Pilar Llop, as well as with judicial associations and the president of the CGPJ, Carlos Lesmes, could be key.
The European leader has already expressed on occasion the urgency that the two main parties agree to renew the body of judges, to later review a reform of the law and allow it to be the judges, and not Parliament, who appoint their representatives in the judicial government.
The Council hopes that the pressure of the European Commissioner will result in an agreement between the PP and PSOE and they will choose the twenty members to renew the body of judges. This visit is key because Lesmes has already warned that if there is no agreement soon, he will resign from his post.
The conservatives hope that there will be a solution in the coming weeks because if the blockade is maintained and Lesmes leaves the body, that could cause a blockage in the Constitutional Court itself. In that scenario, there would be a high probability that the conservative sector would not agree to reach an agreement. Some of them suspect that the Executive is in a hurry to renew the four magistrates of the TC in order to achieve a progressive majority. The Government has already said that if the CGPJ does not appoint the two that correspond to it, it will not wait and will appoint its own, a situation that could cause a schism within the TC in the future if that decision were declared unconstitutional.
