The conservatives of the Judiciary insist on vetoing the progressive candidate for the Constitutional Court and propose another candidate

The conservative members of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) have proposed this Thursday another progressive candidate for magistrate of the Constitutional Court: the former president of the Fourth (Social) Chamber of the Supreme Court María Luisa Segoviano, who retired this year and had postulated to make the leap to the guarantee court.

The maneuver of the Conservatives goes through presenting a candidacy with a Conservative magistrate (they keep César Tolosa) and another progressive, but bypassing the official candidate of the Progressives, the magistrate of the Third Chamber of the Supreme Court José Manuel Bandrés, whom the counselors proposed by the PP veto

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The plenary will meet again on Tuesday, December 27 to vote on this new candidacy.

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The tense debate in the CGPJ when the conservatives tried to remove a progressive member: "Your only objective is to lower the quorum"

The request to convene an extraordinary session again has been formulated by the conservative members José María Macías, Gerardo Martínez Tristán, Nuria Díaz, Juan Manuel Fernández, Wenceslao Olea and Vicente Guilarte.

It will be the second time that the CGPJ has voted to renew the CGPJ after the first attempt failed this Tuesday, in which the conservatives presented Tolosa and Pablo Lucas, magistrate of the Third Chamber.

Both obtained the support of the 10 members of that sector, but 11 votes are needed to be elected.

The progressives en bloc supported their own candidate, so the meeting ended without appointments.

The conservatives, who have delayed the appointments for weeks, are now the ones trying to rush the vote to get ahead of the legal reform promoted by the Government and that would allow Bandrés' candidacy to go ahead.

The decision of the Constitutional Court to suspend the parliamentary processing of the amendments in which the Government had included this change in law has given time to the members proposed by the PP, but the bill announced by the government parties and their allies in the Cortes could be approved in a few weeks.

The intention of the conservatives is to stop the candidacy of Bandrés, whom they consider the preferred candidate for the Government.

In addition, they ensure that this magistrate would vote for magistrate Cándido Conde-Pumpido as future president of the Constitutional Court,

With Judge Segoviano's proposal, the Conservatives achieve the coup d'état of putting on the table the name of a woman (the three candidates voted for on Tuesday were men) who, moreover, has been one of the leaders in breaking the glass ceilings in the judiciary.

In 2020, she became the first woman to preside over a Supreme Court chamber in her more than 200 years, a position she held until her retirement last October.

Sources from the body point out that it was she herself who applied to the previous president of the CGPJ, Carlos Lesmes, to go to the Constitutional Court, and the progressives included her in the list of possible candidates (formed by a dozen names,

In this way, the conservatives intend to play again the trick of presenting a progressive candidate who was on the list that this group put on the table in the negotiations, a movement similar to the one they made for the plenary session last Tuesday presenting Pablo Lucas.

However, both cases are not identical because Lucas was on the list of progressives until the last minute, and, together with Bandrés, they were the candidates on which the members of that group debated and voted to decide their official candidate. .

Finally, Bandrés prevailed by six votes to one.

The withdrawal of Lucas's candidacy implies that the progressives recover one vote (they will have eight) because this candidate is the brother of the vocal Enrique Lucas, proposed by the PNV and attached to this sector, which led him to abstain in the debate and the vote of the previous plenary session.

But the quorum for an applicant to be elected is still 11 (three-fifths of the 18 members of the plenary session) and neither of the two groups add up to that figure on their own, so a pact is needed (with which no one counts for now) or that councilors of one block agree to support the candidate of the other.

This is what the conservatives (who have 10 votes) are looking for again when proposing Segoviano.

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