"Today is a sad day for Spanish democracy", confirmed yesterday in Brussels the Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños. The General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), the highest governing body for judges, served five years with the expired mandate. Already with the faculties diminished and depleted – its president, Carlos Lesmes, resigned a year ago, and currently, after the retirement of Rafael Mozo, Vicente Guilarte holds the position on an interim basis –, there is no hope for its renewal due to the lack of agreement between the PSOE and the Popular Party, the two essential forces to add the necessary reinforced majority in Congress and unlock this constitutional anomaly.
The ominous anniversary, and tomorrow's celebration of Constitution Day, yesterday led the Government, for the umpteenth time and once again unsuccessfully, to try to redouble the pressure on the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Pedro Sánchez himself recognized the existence of lawfare in Spain, at least in the sense of a use of justice for partisan purposes that he attributes to the PP.
Despite the fact that the recognition of lawfare as judicial persecution of the political opponent, contained in the investiture pact between the PSOE and Junts with reference to the harassment of Catalan independence, set fire to all judicial associations and legal agents, the Prime Minister assured that the "most paradigmatic case" of this "politicization of justice" in Spain is the "kidnapping" that he denounced that the CGPJ is suffering at the hands of the PP for blocking its renewal.
"In Spain there is no problem of separation of powers, in Spain there is the problem that the main opposition party is holding hostage, taken, captured, the Judiciary", warned Sánchez to Ser. "There has been a blockade for five years and there has been a progressive government for five years, 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 "that sees how justice deteriorates even more as a result of an interest that is not at all constitutional", he lamented.
"There is an understanding of lawfare that is the politicization of justice. And there is no more paradigmatic case of lawfare and the politicization of justice in Spain than this kidnapping in which the PP is involved in the Judiciary", he emphasized.
Sánchez once again left the door open to a next call for Feijóo in Moncloa, at the start of this new legislature, to try to resolve this entangled conflict. No specifics, for now.
And without another alternative, moreover, because Sánchez already gave 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.
In the same vein, Minister Bolaños denounced five years of "breach of the law and the Constitution by the PP". "It is very serious behavior, which not only discredits the CGPJ, which would be serious in itself, but which is beginning to damage justice itself and also the citizens who want effective judicial protection", criticized Bolaños, at the gates of the meeting of EU justice ministers at the commission's headquarters in Brussels.
Bolaños urged the PP to understand that "this situation of open non-compliance with the law and the Constitution cannot be maintained for one more 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 asked that the PP comply with a law that it agreed 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 indeed a concern of the European Commission", he warned.
Yesterday, the Justice Commissioner, 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 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 - , with the aim of "contributing to achieving a political and negotiated solution to the conflict" with Catalonia.
The head of the Executive defended the "noble objective" of this meeting and those to come - also with ERC, with a different verifier - to "restore coexistence" in Catalonia. And he criticized that the PP "has raised the cry to heaven", giving itself "beats in the chest". "In more difficult circumstances, in more complex negotiations, because they affected violence and the end of terrorism, I remember that Aznar's government met in Switzerland with ETA", he emphasized. And it was not the PP that did it, he warned, but the PP government.
A comparison that, he alleged, "puts in front of the mirror a political right that always looks for any excuse to try to obstruct noble purposes".
