The Constitutional Court is no longer the PP's favourite court

MadridThe time is over when the Constitutional Court was practically an extension of the PP and the PP, usually satisfied with its decisions, demanded "respect" from those who dared to criticise them. With Mariano Rajoy as president, for example, the Spanish government used it as a battering ram against the independence process and before that, by collecting signatures against the Statute, the PP had put the future of autonomous Spain in the hands of the court of guarantees. It was irrelevant whether there were judges whose mandate had expired or even if the president had been a member of a political party (Francisco Pérez de los Cobos admitted having been a member of the PP). But all this has passed into a better life now that the TC has a progressive majority for the first time since 2013.

With the prospect of the TC ruling on the amnesty law in the coming months –Once the composition of the judges who will address all the appeals related to the judicial omission of the Process has been established– the PP prepares the ground to question a possible endorsement of the law. The seven progressives of the plenary session of the TC, who are the majority, have become the target of an offensive by the popular party with the aim of discrediting them and which Alberto Núñez Feijóo is already assuming without hesitation. To the point that the leader of the PP affirmed that the TC is "a political court at the service of the government" and warned that its judges "are not exempt from committing crimes of prevarication."

"I am very concerned that in this court there are a former government minister and a former advisor to the Moncloa," he argued in an interview on The World published this Monday. Feijóo has ignored that in the case of the first, Juan Carlos Campo, he voluntarily withdrew from participating in any decision related to the amnesty - reducing the progressive majority to six in this matter - for having labelled it unconstitutional when he was Minister of Justice. On the other hand, the conservative José María Macías, who as a member of the PP in the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) led a harsh report against the norm while it was being processed in Congress, refused to abstain. With the recusal of Macías, forced to step aside, the popular party has insisted in this framework against the TC, accusing it of having violated their right to make allegations. Hence, both the party and Isabel Díaz Ayuso have appealed the decision that leaves the conservative quota in the deliberation at only four.

The Madrid government is the one that raised the tone the most against the president of the Constitutional Court, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, whom it described as "minister 24 of the Sánchez government." According to Ayuso, if Macías has been removed it is because of a strategy "to expel the dissenting members for the simple fact of not accepting to swallow it all." A few days later, the PP also made an unprecedented decision until now in this attack on Conde-Pumpido, which goes beyond dialectics. The popular party took the TC to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for the first time for having violated its right to "a fair and equitable procedure" with the endorsement of the Constitutional Court to the reform of the Spanish government that allowed the acting CGPJ to appoint its two candidates for magistrate of the TC.

Feijóo has also used as an example of this drift of the TC the rulings of the ERE of Andalusia which annulled the Supreme Court's convictions. This scenario could be repeated with the amnesty law that the high court has resisted applying. "That has shaken the foundations of the State [...] what is happening with the Constitutional Court has never happened before," the popular president has sentenced. The World. The PP frames the attack on the Constitutional Court in a broader denunciation of an attempt by Pedro Sánchez to control all the institutions of the State to stay in power. A drift that the Popular Party maintains is extending to the judiciary with the so-called Begoña law or with the proposed reform of the system of access to the judicial career. "They want to place their cronies to save their entourage [...] once they give up defending their innocence, all they have left is to protect their impunity," said the PP spokesman, Borja Sémper, in a press conference in Genoa, referring to the cases that affect the entourage of the Spanish Prime Minister.

Discontent in the TC

Sources from the Constitutional Court consulted by ARA say that there is "great unease" in the body in the face of the right-wing offensive, which also extends to public criticism from conservative judges and prosecutors and also complaints from far-right entities against some of its judges. They frame this climate as "pressure" linked to the fact that they have to resolve on the amnesty in the coming weeks and months. However, they say that there is no "concern" because the organic law of the Constitutional Court authorizes the court to annul any resolution that undermines its jurisdiction, so they could revoke the investigations for prevarication that the Supreme Court could hypothetically open against any of its members.

In this "crucial week in corruption issues" the PP will deepen its crusade. The Attorney General of the State, Álvaro García Ortiz, investigated for revealing secrets in the Supreme Court, appears this Tuesday afternoon before the Senate Justice Committee. In this regard, Feijóo has shown "concern" about the fact that García Ortiz may go to the TC to save himself from a hypothetical conviction by the TS. In addition, this Thursday the former Minister of Transport José Luis Ábalos testifies as investigated for the Koldo case in the Supreme Court, once Congress gave the green light to the request.

Just this Monday the commissioner of the plot, Víctor de Aldama, has admitted that he has no proof that Ábalos and the minister Ángel Víctor Torres were in the flats he rented in Madrid to see "ladies", as he claimed in his statement. On the other hand, the Supreme Court has summoned two former officials of the Spanish government presidency as witnesses on March 12 in the case of the Attorney General: Pilar Sánchez Acera and Francesc Vallès.