As if it were a Hispanic and pedestrian adaptation of Kafka's The Trial, the story of the paralysis of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) today reaches its fifth consecutive year in office due to the incapacity of the two parties that take turns in the government, PSOE and PP, to agree on its renewal.
This anomaly, which translates into an image of decomposition of the system that delegitimizes the Judiciary before the citizens, has continued since December 4, 2018, so that its dwindling number of members – from 20 has gone to 16 due to resignations and retirements – has been in office since December 2013, when the popular Mariano Rajoy governed, and with his mandate having expired five years ago.
Three presidents have passed through the CGPJ in this decade. The last of them, Vicente Guilarte, who is provisional, has pointed out an emergency exit for the labyrinth of politicization in which the magistrates find themselves: a reform so that it is the judges themselves, without intervention from the leadership, who elect the presidents of the courts at a time when there are already 85 key positions in the judiciary unfilled. Of them, 23 in the Supreme Court, where some rooms are on the verge of collapse. But this proposal to reduce the powers of the CGPJ to facilitate a political agreement is up in the air and the door to renewal remains closed.
Guilarte's, who met with the new Minister of Justice, Félix Bolaños, and tries to bring closer positions between PSOE and PP, joins a chain of attempts to unblock the governing body of the judges. All fruitless. And the polarization that derives from the inauguration of Pedro Sánchez thanks to the promotion of an amnesty law that has infuriated the judicial establishment and has thrown the PP into the streets does not suggest even a solution.
Be that as it may, it is unlikely that the agreement that was almost closed in 2018 will be resumed and that in the end the leadership of the PP, with Pablo Casado at the helm, decided to delay it, with various justifications, until it was left to rot. And even less so that a new one is subscribed. However, renewal is a priority objective of the Government, which has already received several warnings from the European institutions and even maneuvered in the previous legislature to eliminate the qualified majority of three-fifths of the Cortes that the Constitution requires. But Brussels did not agree to change the rules of the game.
The new leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who at first seemed in favor of an agreement with the Executive of Pedro Sánchez in judicial matters, soon followed in the footsteps of his predecessor and refused to sign an agreement without the prior commitment to legal reform. so that the same judges are the ones who choose the members of the CGPJ.
The call for a resignation of all the members to force the parties has also been raised, but the mistrust between the conservative, majority, and progressive members has thwarted that possibility. Thus, the CGPJ is approaching the abyss and, far from stopping, it advances in politicization with unprecedented decisions such as the preparation of a report contrary to the amnesty law before it was known or the refusal to declare Álvaro García Ortiz suitable as attorney general.
