The former vice president of the Government Carmen Calvo has obtained a favorable report from Congress on her suitability to assume the presidency of the Council of State by 19 votes to 18, after a tense debate in which the PP, Vox and UPN questioned whether she meets the requirement of have “proven prestige” to assume it.
The spokespersons of both parties first sought elevation and accused the President of the Government of “colonizing” the institutions, appointing his close collaborators to occupy positions of legal relevance, prioritizing the criteria of ideological affinity.
Calvo, in turn, argued that political experience is essential to exercise a responsibility such as that of the presidency of the highest advisory body of the Government and she stressed the subjectivity that always accompanies the judgment on the prestige of any person.
“The recognized prestige,” she stated, “will continue to be an indeterminate legal concept.”
The report approved by Congress is mandatory, but not binding, although losing the vote always has political weight and is a stain.
The independentistas have ended up voting in favor of him, despite their reluctance regarding Calvo.
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Carlos Flores (Vox) and Carmen Navarro (PP) brought up the minutes of the Senate Plenary Session to cite an intervention by Carmen Calvo in which she opposed considering the possible amnesty for the leaders of the
process
, due to alleged lack of constitutional fit.
Carmen Calvo replied that what will be required of her as president of the Council of State is to act “with neutrality”, not to lack personal opinions.
"We question," Flores said, "her credibility, because we remember how in April 2021, when she was first vice president, she responded to a pro-independence senator that an amnesty law had no place in the constitutional system or in the rule of law of Spain, but not in any other European country, although now he has tried to justify it on a radio station, saying the complete opposite of what he said in the Senate."
Calvo's opinions on the amnesty law were partly the reason why Junts, ERC, PNV and Bildu did not speak in the session of the Constitutional Commission of Congress, although they did support the favorable opinion with their vote. suitability of Carmen Calvo, together with the PSOE and Sumar.
Sources from the pro-independence parties indicated, on the one hand, that they wanted to show their reservations with Calvo's criteria in some matters—not only the amnesty, but also in certain points of her “classic” feminist discourse—but that at the same time they did not want to leave to support an appointment proposal that comes from the presidency of the Government.
In the same sources it was suggested that the positive vote is, in essence, a good sign regarding the continuity of the agreements with the Executive, starting with the one that must be closed before next March 7 for the approval of the amnesty law in Congress.
Sumar also criticized Carmen Calvo's positions on the
Trans law,
although without questioning her suitability for the position.
Her spokesperson, Esther Gil, made a strong defense of the rights of this group, advocating to “fight transphobia.”
Carlos Flores (Vox) and Carmen Navarro (PP) extended their gratitude, however, to the Supreme Court for having allowed the Hay Derecho association to direct its fight in another direction, that of refining its doctrine on the concept of “legal prestige” for deny it to Calvo's predecessor, former Labor Minister Magdalena Valerio.
This Supreme Court ruling will be challenged before the Constitutional Court through appeals for protection that will be presented by both the State Attorney's Office and Valerio herself.
Flores and Navarro, on the other hand, presented Carmen Calvo's academic curriculum in some detail to reach the conclusion that she did not demonstrate her "prestige" before the legal community, due to her long dedication to politics, to the detriment of her publications, direction of doctoral theses or contributions to the development of constitutional doctrine.
Calvo's response to Flores was to attribute a legal ideology contrary to the consideration of gender for having criticized, for example, the type of publications in which she collaborated as a professor of Constitutional Law, which according to the Vox deputy was not one of the most predicament in academic circles.
And Calvo reproached Deputy Navarro for having resorted to allusions to the arrests related to the
Koldo case,
related to a new mask plot during the pandemic, attributing to her belonging to a Government contaminated by these investigations.
Calvo replied to the popular spokesperson that she resorted to the “sound of a simple control session” in order to use what she said about a hypothetical amnesty law in order to do a “dressing job” in her opposition speech .
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