Institutional respect between the executive and judicial branches has exploded. Next December 4, the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) will complete its five-year expired mandate; For days now the judges have been up in arms against the amnesty and the insinuations of lawfare; Sumar – a junior partner of the Government – has denounced the conservative group of the Council for prevarication, and Pedro Sánchez has unified the ministries of the Presidency and Justice under the leadership of Félix Bolaños, seen from part of the judiciary as a provocation. With this staging the new legislature begins, which predicts a head-on clash between both powers.
As Minister of Justice, Bolaños is in charge of trying to unblock the renewal of the governing body of the judges, whose mandate expired in December 2018. His first gesture was to meet with the acting president, Vicente Guilarte, as a sign of commitment to ending with this situation, for which the Popular Party is unilaterally blamed, which has refused for years, already with Pablo Casado as leader of the opposition, to agree on a renewal agreement with the PSOE.
Guilarte's situation is delicate. He became president of the CGPJ in July as the second star after the resignation of Carlos Lesmes, who was replaced by Rafael Mozo, who retired this summer. The current president is committed to a moderate role and one inclined to renew the body. As he has said, he is not a negotiating agent because the renewal involves the appointment of twenty members by Parliament by a three-fifths majority, which makes an understanding between PSOE and PP mandatory.
Although he is not from the hard core, Guilarte is considered a member chosen by the conservative wing. On Friday he left evidence to Bolaños that he will do everything in his power to ensure that there is a renewal as soon as possible. The problem is that the increasingly evident confrontation between the Government and the CGPJ complicates Guilarte's role. Sources from the progressive sector of the Council explain that the president now has very little room for maneuver.
The majority conservative group is becoming more and more belligerent, issuing statements without the president. In fact, last Friday a group of members, sponsored by member José María Macías, sent a letter to different leaders of the European Union stating that Sumar's complaint seeks his “personal and moral annihilation.”
These sources explain that Guilarte is tied hand and foot because the conservative group acts on its own. “The Council has become a political weapon,” laments a member of the body, who sees the actions of some members as the arm of the PP within the body. “Right now we are living the paradigm of everything that a Council should not be,” laments this source, who recalls that the CGPJ of the Lesmes era, discreet and without entering into political battles, has disappeared.
A similar criterion is held within the Government, which sees the conservative bloc as a “satellite” of the PP. Therefore, the future of this relationship is rather bleak. “There is no way out,” CGPJ sources acknowledge. From the Executive, they admit that the situation of confrontation with the PP, together with the role of the conservative members of the Council, makes it very difficult to achieve its renewal.
An idea that some socialist leaders have been planning for months is whether they should recover the proposal put forward by Podemos to change the majority system for the election of members, to avoid the pact with the PP. The President of the Government has ruled out that option, once Europe issued a warning about the attack on judicial independence that this reform would entail.
Popular sources do not believe Sánchez's word and suspect that this alternative could be on the table at any time. Of course, what they assure is that today the blockade will remain. Over the last few years, the PP has used a series of arguments, different and varied depending on the moment, to block the renewal of the CGPJ. The last one was the amnesty.
These sources argue that an agreement with the PSOE to change the members would now be impossible. They cannot give the message to their voters to negotiate with the socialists after they have achieved the investiture of Sánchez by granting amnesty to all those accused of the process. When the PP is taking people to the streets to demonstrate against the amnesty and sees with deep concern the agreement between the PSOE and Junts to support investigative commissions against what the latter consider a judicial persecution against the independence leaders, the popular people understand that now less than ever can they agree on the renewal of the Council.
This confrontation is what Bolaños wants to resolve. However, tension with the judiciary continues to grow. Although the minister has distanced himself from Sumar's complaint, sources from the conservative bloc of the CGPJ suspect that there is knowledge of Sánchez behind the actions of Yolanda Díaz's party. “They play good cop and bad cop,” maintains a source from the organization. Furthermore, once the amnesty is approved, the focus will be on the judges, who must be the ones to apply it. “Then it will be seen if Bolaños' role is to seek an understanding or a total clash,” he concludes.
The General Council of the Judiciary has had the same members since 2013. Its five-year mandate ended in December 2018. Since then there have been several unsuccessful approaches and several confrontations until reaching complete disagreement on the part of the PP and the PSOE. In November 2018, a few days after the mandate of the CGPJ expired, Pedro Sánchez, newly elected president after the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy, reached an agreement with the leader of the PP Pablo Casado to renew the institution, under the presidency of Manuel Marchena.
The leak of a message from the then spokesperson of the PP in the Senate Ignacio Cosidó, in which he assured that the consensus achieved allowed his party to control the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court “from behind”, put an end to the pact. Since then there have been multiple – the PSOE estimates around thirty – the PP's excuses for refusing to agree with the socialists. One of the latest, in addition to the pardons and amnesty, is the demand to modify the current law that establishes the system of election of members. Alberto Núñez Feijóo's party is immovable. If the law is not changed, the Council will remain blocked
