The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, will assume the presidency of the European Union with the blockade of the judiciary unresolved. From Europe they have been asking him for months to remedy this anomaly.
However, the blockade, which is maintained due to the PP's fierce opposition to agreeing on the appointment of new magistrates who, if the replacement is accepted, would have a progressive bias, seems to be accepted by everyone and no one believes that it will be resolved before the elections in December.
However, the Constitutional Court will have in its hand a solution, albeit partial, to the situation of collapse.
According to sources from the guarantee court, its president, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, will take to the plenary session, which will be held just after the regional and municipal elections on May 28, the paper for debate and voting on the appeal presented by Vox against the reform promoted by PSOE and Unidas Podemos to prevent the body of judges from continuing to appoint magistrates while they are in office.
That reform, approved in March 2021, was conceived to put pressure on the PP and get it to renew the Council, with the mandate expired five years ago. If the conservative majority remained handcuffed and could not continue appointing magistrates for the Supreme Court and the higher courts of justice, perhaps the popular ones would agree to negotiate with the Socialists and agree on the list of 20 members who would replace the current ones. But not with those.
For the past two years, the Council has been unable to appoint magistrates, which is posing a serious problem for the High Court.
Europe has warned of the risk posed by this blockade. The community club requires countries to take special care in this matter, among other reasons because it does not want to offer any alibi to Poland and Hungary, two partners accused of violating the rules of the rule of common law.
In this context, Spain will assume the community presidency on July 1. And the stranded judiciary is a bad message.
Conde-Pumpido lends himself to resolving, or at least softening, this issue. He will wait for the elections to pass and for the rapporteur in this case, the progressive magistrate María Luisa Balaguer, to finish her writing. She will not do it before so as not to interfere in the political situation.
And it is very possible that Balaguer's proposal and the vote of the progressives will partially overthrow the reform promoted two years ago by the PSOE and Podemos -and favorably sanctioned by Congress-, which would allow the body of judges to recover their power to make appointments while the PP and PSOE fail to reach an agreement to renew the Council.
Paradoxically, it would not be bad news for the Government. A ruling that questions some but not all of the measures approved at the time limiting the ability of the judiciary to act would allow Sánchez to reach the current community presidency with a part of the blockade resolved without having given in politically to the positions of the Popular Party.
In any case, the decision of the court on this issue is already urgent. The previous president of the court, Pedro González-Trevijano, put this file at the bottom of the list of tasks for the plenary session. The matter has been unresolved for two years now, despite the fact that the judiciary itself has shown its discomfort at the delay in such a nuclear matter.
There are two appeals filed on this reform, one from Vox and the other from the PP. The one from Santiago Abascal's party was the first to enter the court and therefore must be the first to be resolved. The second, that of the PP, is in the hands of the conservative magistrate César Tolosa, a career judge who comes from the Supreme Court as president of the Administrative Litigation Chamber, one of the most affected by the lack of magistrates after the reform.
This matter is going to be a litmus test for the progressive bloc, which currently has the majority with seven magistrates compared to four. Most likely, magistrate Juan Carlos Campo will have to abstain as he was Minister of Justice when the reform was carried out. If this happens, the position adopted by María Luisa Segoviano will be key, who, although she has voted with the progressives since her arrival in December, cannot forget that she came from being president of the Social Chamber of the Supreme Court and that, consequently, is sensitive to the situation that his former colleagues have been denouncing for months.
The Supreme Court has been warning for some time of the collapse to which the Supreme Court is headed if the positions are not filled and has repeatedly asked the Ministry of Justice for more lawyers and staff to stop the decline in magistrates due to retirements or deaths that have left posts without cover.
