The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez will assume the presidency of the European Union with the blockade of the Judicial Power unresolved. From Europe they have been asking him for months to remedy this anomaly.
Despite this, the blockade, which is maintained by the fierce opposition of the PP to agreeing on the appointment of new magistrates – who, if the transfer is accepted, would have a progressive bias -, seems assumed by everyone, and no one believes which must be resolved before the December elections.
Nevertheless, the Constitutional Court will have in its hands a solution, even if it is partial, to the situation of collapse.
According to sources from the court of guarantees, its president, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, will bring to the plenary session that will be held just after the regional and municipal elections on May 28 the report for debate and voting on the appeal presented by Vox against the reform promoted by the PSOE and Unides Podemos to prevent the body of judges from continuing to appoint magistrates while in office.
This reform, approved in March 2021, was designed to put pressure on the PP and get it to renew the council, whose mandate expired five years ago. If the conservative majority had their hands tied and could not continue appointing magistrates for the Supreme Court and the higher courts of justice, perhaps the popular people would come to negotiate with the socialists and agree on the list of twenty members who would replace the current ones. But not like that.
For two years, the council has not been able to appoint magistrates, and this 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 common law state.
In this context, Spain will assume the EU presidency on July 1. And the judiciary stuck is a bad message.
Conde-Pumpido is ready to resolve, or at least soften, this matter. He will wait for the elections to pass and for the speaker of the case, the progressive magistrate MarÃa Luisa Balaguer, to finish her writing. He 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 overturn the reform promoted two years ago by the PSOE and Podemos -and favorably sanctioned by Congress-, which would allow the body of judges to regain the power to make appointments while the PP and the PSOE fail to reach an agreement to renew the Council.
Paradoxically, it would not be bad news for the Central Government. A sentence that questioned some but not all of the measures approved at the time limiting the ability of the Judiciary to act would allow Pedro Sánchez to reach the community presidency in turn with part of the blockade resolved without having politically yielded to the Party’s positions popular
In any case, the court’s decision on this matter is already urgent. The previous president of the court, Pedro González-Trevijano, put this file at the end of the plenary’s list of tasks. The issue has been unresolved for two years now, despite the fact that the Judiciary itself has shown its displeasure at the delay in such a nuclear case.
Two appeals have been filed on this reform, one by Vox and another by the PP. That of 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 will be a litmus test for the progressive bloc, which currently has the majority, with seven magistrates against four. Most likely the magistrate Juan Carlos Campo will have to abstain, since he was Minister of Justice when the reform was carried out. If this happens, it will be key the attitude adopted by MarÃa Luisa Segoviano, of whom, although she has voted with the progressives since her arrival in December, we cannot forget that she is president of the Social Chamber of the Supreme Court and that, consequently, he is sensitive to the situation that his former colleagues have been complaining about for months.
The Supreme Court has been warning for some time of the collapse towards which the court is being pushed if the places are not filled, and has already demanded on several occasions from the Ministry of Justice more lawyers and more staff to stop the decline of magistrates in the face of retirements or deaths that have left vacancies unfilled.
