Carmen Calvo assumes the presidency of the State Council as a “space for legal reflection, not controversy”

The former vice president of the Government Carmen Calvo took office this Wednesday as president of the Council of State.

In the act she has claimed the role of this institution as a factor of balance of the system, and therefore dedicated to “legal reflection, not political controversy.”

In her speech, Calvo stressed that the main role of the advisory body is to “help the Government in its task of promoting legislation.”

The Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños, who presided over the ceremony, has emphasized similar considerations about the role of the institution to highlight that the political debate must stop consisting of polarization, permanent clashes and “ war without quarter.”

Carmen Calvo takes over from the former Minister of Labor Magdalena Valerio, whose appointment as head of the Council of State was annulled by the Supreme Court, which considered that she did not meet the requirement of having the accredited legal prestige required for the position.

This sentence is going to be appealed for protection before the Constitutional Court by the Government and has already been appealed by the former president of the Council, whom Bolaños thanked for her work during the 13 months that she has held office.

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The new president of the Council – who was sponsored by the permanent councilor Miguel Herrero de Miñón and by the elective councilor María Emilia Casas – explained that she is beginning this new stage “safe and confident because I know of the immense wealth of prestige and rigor of this house.” to add that “in this country, courage, bravery is possessed by those of us who seek balance, those of us who move in moderation.”

In radicalism, he continued, “a lot of cowardice is permanently harbored,” immediately emphasizing that “this is a buttress body of the rule of law,” because “political controversy is part of the superior value of our Constitution, such as pluralism and ideological diversity, but this body is the buttress of the legal security that citizens must feel, to give peace of mind to their institutions.”

Bolaños, for his part, highlighted the career of Carmen Calvo, as a professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Córdoba, and with extensive experience in public positions in the regional and State administrations, emphasizing that in all these positions she was characterized by “ "the continuous defense of democratic values, institutions and equality between men and women."

For Bolaños, the moment in which the Council of State begins a new stage is especially important, because "reflection, calm, dialogue are required, it is absolutely essential, more essential than ever in the current situation of our country."

Both Carmen Calvo and Bolaños stressed that in 2026 it will be five centuries since the creation of the Council of State, for which various commemorative events will already begin to be prepared.

Remembering this, the minister – who represented the President of the Government, on an official trip to Brazil, at the inauguration – stressed that institutions serve “to articulate governments, but they are also spaces for the representation of the different ideological options that coexist naturally in our country".

And those institutions “that remain over time, like the Council of State, are the ones that sustain democracy, with the different changes of political color” of their managers, so “identifying the State with its institutions is respecting the functioning of the system".

To a large extent, the event as a whole sought to be a conciliatory parenthesis between the old walls of the Council of State, where, among other political leaders from various stages, the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, the former president of Congress Meritxell Batet and the former vice president of the Government Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría.

Between jokes and truth, the most repeated comments between themselves and other attendees were those alluding to the contrast between the repeated invocations of dialogue and mutual respect in the speeches given, and the external noise as a characteristic of the political debate.

In this context, Bolaños ended his speech welcoming Carmen Calvo by advocating the work of “making our society a public space that is more habitable,” which requires “more politics, not less, and more dialogue.”

All this because Spain and other Western countries "are suffering from extreme polarization", in which "the different person is conceived as an adversary, totally antagonistic", so the political debate is frequently "an all-out war".

Faced with this reality, the role of the Council of State — he added — is to provide “reflection,” because polarization is “a risk for public debate” and leads to “distrust in institutions.”

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