If the options were now or never, everything indicates that it will be now. This time yes, although the agreement comes almost four years late. The best proof that the negotiation between the Government and the Popular Party to finally renew the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) is practically complete, if not definitively sealed, is that both parties are already discussing how and when to stage the pact. “We are already late”, they urge in any case from the Executive.
The forecast, according to government sources, would be to formalize the judicial agreement with the PP when Pedro Sánchez returns from Pretoria this Friday. One of the options considered in the Government, therefore, was that the pact could be staged like this tomorrow.
However, other sources allege that the president will arrive at Moncloa too late this Friday. On Saturday, in addition, Sánchez will travel to Seville, to star in a rally with Felipe González to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the socialist electoral victory of 1982. Therefore, they are betting that the staging of the judicial pact with the PP will be next week. The meeting of the Council of Ministers will be brought forward to Monday, because Tuesday is a holiday. It remains to be decided, therefore, on what day the agreement to renew the governing body of the judges can be made official.
And also who will stage it. If Sánchez himself and the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, at the highest level, do not take care of it publicly, the negotiators of both parties, that is, Félix Bolaños and Esteban González Pons, would do so, according to sources from the talks.
Everything, hoping that nothing goes wrong at the last moment for reasons unrelated to the negotiation, as has happened on previous occasions. Both the PSOE and the PP, in fact, face strong pressures tending to derail the agreement, which come both from the space to the left of the former and from the right of the latter.
For the formation of Feijóo, thus, it is an inconvenience that the Government reactivates the debate on the reform of the crime of sedition, in its ongoing negotiations with the ERC to redirect the political conflict in Catalonia, since it feeds the pressures that seek to blow up a pact with the socialists to unblock the Judiciary. The extreme right of Vox, in addition, will come out in a storm against a PP that reaches agreements with the Government, in full prelude to the new electoral cycle.
In the PSOE they also assume that Podemos may intend to charge against an agreement that Minister Bolaños negotiates within the Government with Vice President Yolanda Díaz, through Enrique Santiago. Precisely to avoid the stumbling block of the purple formation’s commitment to Victoria Rosell – incompatible with the pact so that the members of the CGPJ do not come from an immediate political position – the vice president is already wielding her own alternative proposals.
