“Today is a sad day for Spanish democracy,” the Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños, certified yesterday in Brussels. The General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), the highest governing body of judges, completed five years of its expired mandate. Already with its faculties diminished and beheaded – its president, Carlos Lesmes, resigned a year ago, and currently, after the retirement of Rafel Mozo, Vicente Guilarte occupies the position on an interim basis –, there is no hope for its renewal in the absence of agreement between the PSOE and the Popular Party, the two essential forces to add the necessary reinforced majority in Congress and unblock this constitutional anomaly.
The fateful anniversary, and tomorrow's celebration of Constitution Day, yesterday led the Government, for the umpteenth time and again without success, to try to redouble the pressure on the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Pedro Sánchez himself thus recognized the existence of lawfare in Spain, at least in its meaning of the use of justice for partisan purposes, which he attributed to the PP.
Although the recognition of lawfare as judicial persecution of the political adversary, included in the investiture pact between the PSOE and Junts in reference to the harassment of the Catalan independence movement, set all judicial associations and legal agents on fire, the President of the Government assured that the The “most paradigmatic case” of this “politicization of justice” in Spain is the “kidnapping” that the CGPJ reported suffering at the hands of the PP, by blocking its renewal.
“In Spain there is no problem of separation of powers, in Spain there is a problem that the main opposition party has the Judiciary hostage, imprisoned, captured,” Sánchez warned in Ser. “We have been in blockade for five years and five years of progressive government, there is no need to make a sketch for people to understand the motivations behind this blockade of the PP,” he said. “And the consequences are terrible,” he warned. Not only for the judges, but for a citizenry “who sees how justice deteriorates even more as a result of an interest that is not at all constitutional,” he lamented.
“There is a meaning of lawfare that is the politicization of justice. And there is no more paradigmatic case of lawfare and politicization of justice in Spain than this kidnapping in which the PP has plunged the Judiciary,” he stressed.
The President of the Government once again left the door open to an upcoming call by Feijóo to the Moncloa, at the start of this new legislature, to try to untangle this entrenched conflict. No specificity, for now.
And with no other alternative, furthermore, because Sánchez has already given up changing the parliamentary majorities required by the Constitution to renew the CGPJ, after the European Commission was put on alert when it tried to do so in the previous legislature.
Along the same lines, Minister Bolaños denounced that five years “of non-compliance with the law and the Constitution by the PP” have thus been consummated. “It is a very serious behavior, which is not only discrediting the CGPJ, which in itself would be serious, but is beginning to harm the justice system itself and also the citizens who want effective judicial protection,” criticized Bolaños, to the doors of the meeting of EU justice ministers at the Commission headquarters in Brussels.
Bolaños appealed for the PP to understand that “this situation of open non-compliance with the law and the Constitution cannot continue for another day.” With a dire prognosis, if Feijóo does not agree to the agreement during the legislature that is now starting: “Four more years in this situation would be the total collapse of justice.”
The minister demanded that the PP comply with a law that was agreed upon with the PSOE in 2001, under the mandate of José María Aznar, and that he defended as “a balanced model, which has worked well for decades and has given stability to justice.” He claimed it, thus, “for the good of Spain.” “Because this is a concern of the European Commission,” he warned.
Yesterday, the Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, reiterated that Europe considers it a “priority” to renew it and then reform the appointment system if there is an agreement between the parties
Sánchez also alluded to Aznar yesterday, to try in turn to appease the right-wing offensive against the amnesty and against the meeting that the PSOE and Junts held on Saturday, with an international verifier – the Salvadoran diplomat Francisco Galindo Vélez –, for the purpose to “contribute to reaching a political and negotiated solution to the conflict” with Catalonia.
The Chief Executive defended the “noble objective” and those to come – also with ERC, in turn with a different verifier – to “restore coexistence” in Catalonia. And he criticized that the PP “has raised a cry to the sky,” hitting itself “in the chest.” “In more difficult circumstances, in much more complex negotiations, because they affected violence and the end of terrorism, I remember the Aznar government meeting in Switzerland with ETA,” he highlighted. And it was not the PP that did it, he warned, but the PP government.
A comparison that, he alleged, “puts in the mirror a political right that always looks for any excuse to try to hinder noble purposes.”
