The president of the Constitutional, Pedro González-Trevijano, tiptoed this Tuesday through the act of commemoration of the Constitution held in Congress.
Unlike what happened a year ago, this time he did not stop in front of the journalists or make statements at the point reserved for this, in the access patio to the Lower House.
Trevijano knows perfectly well that the five magistrates of the progressive bloc are in favor of granting the favor to Juan Carlos Campo and Laura Díaz, the two jurists appointed by the Government to join the court, and that only the opposition of the six members of the conservative sector —including himself— may prevent it, at the cost of blocking the operation of the guarantee body.
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Hence the relevance of the meeting that took place in the office of the president of Congress, Meritxell Batet, which was the scene this Tuesday of a short but intense conversation between the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the presidents of the General Council of the Judiciary , Rafael Mozo, and the president of the Constitutional.
The conversation lasted long enough for all the participants to express the opinion that it is necessary to get out of the situation that both the governing body of the judges and the guarantor of the Constitution are going through.
What no one said is how to achieve it.
In any case, Mozo and Trevijano promised in that improvised dialogue in the office of the president of Congress to hold an interview in the coming days and to keep communication between the two bodies open, waiting for the next day 22 —the date for in which both instances have convened plenary sessions—some progress is achieved.
In the Constitutional Court, however, pessimism reigns over the possibility that the conservative majority of the Judiciary facilitates in that plenary session the appointment of the two magistrates that it is responsible for appointing.
If this forecast is fulfilled, the guarantee court is going to face one of the most delicate decisions in its history, to decide whether to accept the two magistrates that the Government has already chosen, or to veto them,
Hence, the president of the Constitutional Council tiptoed this Tuesday through the act of commemoration of the 44th anniversary of the Constitution, without stopping to participate in the long groups in the Salón de los Pasos Perdidos that followed the speech of the president, Meritxell Batet.
It was Trevijano's first public appearance after he refused last Wednesday to convene a plenary session of the court at the request of three magistrates from the progressive sector, Ramón Sáez, Inmaculada Montalbán and Cándido Conde-Pumpido.
The other two members of this group, Juan Antonio Xiol and María Luisa Balaguer, supported that the plenary session to decide whether the Constitutional Court gives or denies approval to the two jurists appointed by the Government be held after December 22, when it is already known if the Judiciary has appointed its two magistrates.
In parallel, the closing ranks of the conservative sector of the Constitutional Court, which refused en bloc to pronounce immediately on the placet to the jurists proposed by the Government, has generated great concern in the progressive group, which considers that the master key to solving the situation is in the hands of Trevijano.
This is due to the fact that the president of the Constitutional Court has the deciding vote if there is a five-way tie between conservatives and progressives.
It is not a casting vote, because the court now has 11 members, once the conservative Alfredo Montoya resigned, but simply the vote that can decide whether the Constitutional Court is renewed or not in the event of a frontal clash like the one that Now it is predicted between the two blocks of the guarantee court.
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