Feijóo accuses Casado of hiding the pact with the Government by the Judiciary and the team of the former leader of the PP denies it

The revelation by EL PAÍS this Tuesday that there was a pact between the Government and the PP signed in October 2021 to reform the law of the Judiciary has led to the first internal clash in the PP after the arrival of Alberto Núñez Feijóo to the party presidency.

The leaders of Pablo Casado and Feijóo have become entangled around this agreement, after the leader of the PP accused his predecessor in office, Pablo Casado, and the former general secretary of the PP, Teodoro García Egea, of having signed a pact with the Executive hiding it from the popular leadership;

both the old and the new dome, as well as himself.

Casado's management —through the former Deputy Secretary of Communication, Pablo Montesinos, very close to the ousted leader— has denied that he did not inform the newcomer of everything related to this matter.

The first to shoot at his predecessors in the leadership of the PP to disassociate himself from the pact that they had reached with the Government of Pedro Sánchez in the autumn of 2021 was Feijóo himself.

The leader of the PP has reiterated this Thursday that he was not aware of the document of the agreement published by this newspaper -although his negotiator for this matter, Esteban González Pons, acknowledged yesterday that he had seen it- and has accused Casado and García Egea of ​​signing a pact that was unknown to the leadership of the PP.

“What members of the previous management committee have told me is that none of them discussed any issue signed between the minister and the general secretary of the PP,” Feijóo said in statements to the media in Porto do Son (A Coruña). ).

“When I dispatched the transfer of powers with Casado,

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Bolaños believes that Feijóo "is not trustworthy" by not complying with the pact signed by the PP to reform the law of the Judiciary

In this way, Feijóo comes to accuse the two heads of the previous leadership of the PP of concocting a secret pact even for his own party, and which, moreover, would not have been disclosed to him when he acceded to the popular presidency, in April of this year.

The popular leader maintains that his predecessor in office, who was ousted by the political organization after his internal war with Isabel Díaz Ayuso, carried out a partial transfer of powers, hiding from him something as relevant as a written agreement signed by his then right-hand man, Teodoro García Egea, with the Minister of the Presidency of the Government of Pedro Sánchez, Félix Bolaños.

EL PAÍS has tried to obtain Pablo Casado's version on this matter, but has received no response.

However, one of the most trusted leaders of the former leader of the PP during his mandate, Pablo Montesinos -his head of communication and one of the few faithful who stayed by his side until the end- maintains that the transfer of powers was exemplary and all the information related to this matter was transmitted.

“I know that there was communication between the previous leadership of the party, between the general secretary and our head of justice, and the new heads of the matter.

And then, let's see, the parliamentary spokesperson has not changed.

Cuca Gamarra was a spokesperson with Pablo Casado and is a spokesperson with Feijóo ”, he has abounded in La Sexta.

Gamarra, however,

She assures that she did not know about the agreement until the Minister of the Presidency told her about it.

"It's false.

I was not aware, it was Bolaños, like Pons, who told me about him, ”he tells EL PAÍS.

Other sources from the previous management maintain that Gamarra was made aware of the agreement on her day.

The episode reveals the tension that persists between the previous leadership of the PP —whose departure was traumatic— and the current leadership of Feijóo, which could cause problems in the future for the conservative leader.

Also that the popular leader has difficulties in arguing why the PP still does not agree with the CGPJ Government, despite the fact that he has already done so in the past.

Feijóo has tried to distance himself from the agreement, in addition, insisting on the thesis that the Government did not give value to the document revealed by EL PAÍS either because in his first private meeting with the president, last April, Sánchez and he were in "resuming talks" about the General Council of the Judiciary.

"We fled from the end of negotiations because we were beginning a new stage," Feijóo defended.

However, government sources insist that during the private meetings that Félix Bolaños held with the top leaders of the PP after Feijóo became president of the PP (Cuca Gamarra and Esteban González Pons), the signed document was on the table .

However, the PP leader insists again and again in public that he was not aware of the text.

Since EL PAÍS published this Tuesday the text signed by García Egea and Félix Bolaños in the fall of 2021, the PP has been offering disparate versions of the terms of the agreement.

On Tuesday, the deputy secretary for regional coordination of the PP, Pedro Rollán, stated that "no member of the Government made reference to any previously signed document."

Instead, a day later, on Wednesday, the institutional deputy secretary, Esteban González Pons, admitted that the Minister of the Presidency showed him the document in the first meeting they held and asked him to comply with the PP.

Now, Feijóo chooses to accuse his predecessor in office of hiding it from him, as well as the previous leadership of his own party.

The leader of the PP has also explained this Thursday his conditions to agree on the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), which the popular have resisted agreeing on for more than three years.

These are four demands that the PP left in writing in a seven-page document that it made public last July, just before breaking off negotiations with the Government.

Although the document contains more demands, Feijóo has only cited four today.

The first is that judges who are appointed to politically elected positions cannot re-enter active service until two years have elapsed.

Second, that those who have held political office in the immediately preceding five years cannot be appointed members of the CGPJ.

Also,

that the presidents of the room have a seniority of 25 years.

And, finally, the creation of a thousand new judge positions in the next five years.

The popular leader has avoided mentioning the reform approved by the Government in July to be able to renew only the magistrates of the Constitutional Court, a reform that the PP demanded to withdraw to resume talks with the Government.

Party sources have indicated, however, that his position has not changed at all and that demand "is fully valid."

The pact to renew the CGPJ returns, therefore, to the deadlock, with the novelty that the PP is involved in internal disputes to circumvent the fact that the previous leadership had signed an agreement in writing with the Government from which the current chooses for disassociating.