José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero named him “Superbolaños”, a resounding appellation that nevertheless does not match well with the desire for discretion and humble but meticulous work in the shadows, which always characterized the lawyer Félix Bolaños (Madrid, 1975).
His superpowers in the government will now be doubled, in any case, to add the portfolio of Justice to the Ministry of the Presidency and Relations with the Courts. In this way, it must be said that Bolaños will deploy its powers in and before the three powers of the State: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.
The same Pedro Sánchez, who met Bolaños when they both shared militancy in the PSOE in Madrid, defined him as “one of the most brilliant personalities of the new batch of socialists”. And already as secretary of the PSOE’s federal commission of ethics and guarantees, Bolaños informed Sánchez, before he became official, of his overwhelming victory over Susana Díaz in the 2017 primaries with which he regained the leadership of the party.
Head of the legal advisory division of the Bank of Spain – and the first of his promotion in the courses he took at the School of Legal Practice -, Sánchez entrusted him in his new mandate to the party with the preparation of the new regulation of the statutes of the PSOE. And when the socialist leader arrived in Moncloa, in 2018, he signed Bolaños as general secretary of the Presidency of the Government. In 2021 he was already promoted to Minister of the Presidency, Relations with the Courts and Democratic Memory.
Among his special missions carried out in the Executive, it is worth highlighting since the exhumation of Franco’s remains on the Catalan agenda, with special dedication to pardons for the leaders of the imprisoned process or, now, the proposal of the amnesty law negotiated with ERC and Junts.
Yesterday, Bolaños already contacted the vice-president of the European Commission and the Commissioner for Justice, Vera Jourová and Didier Reynders, before whom he defended that this legislative initiative “responds to the will shared by the absolute majority of the parties of the Congress to normalize the institutional, political and social situation in Catalonia, and to open a new stage that overcomes the tension of recent years”.
The minister justified them that the rule is “fully congruent with the European order and values ??and impeccable from a constitutional perspective”. Bolaños, in any case, will travel next week to Brussels to hold meetings with both. “The rule of law in Spain is solid and will continue to be so,” he told them.
