Feijóo insists that he was not aware of the agreement with the Government on the Judiciary and says that Casado did not take it to the PP Steering Committee

In a press conference in the town after visiting the Galician town of Porto do Son, the leader of the opposition has reacted publicly for the first time to the publication by the newspaper El País of the agreement that the minister put in writing in October 2021 of Presidency, Félix Bolaños, and the former general secretary of the PP, Teodoro García Egea, to modify the powers of the General Council of the Judiciary and allow it to appoint two magistrates of the Constitutional Court. “Obviously I didn’t know him. Nobody gave it to me. It has never been valued in the previous or current Management Committee ”, the president of the conservative formation has settled.

Feijóo has considered that this text, published this Tuesday, “should not have any value”, since, as he explained, the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, agreed with him to resume talks about the Judiciary from scratch when he assumed the PP address. “The president and I agreed to tell them that we were going to resume talks about the Judiciary and we agreed on the term. We avoided talking about ‘negotiations’ because it was a new stage”, he justified himself.

“In no committee of the Steering Committee was there any discussion of any document or any issue signed between the minister and the former general secretary of the PP. This is what has been transferred to me. When I spoke with Mr. Casado, in no case did he give me any document or agree with me, ”continued the leader of the PP, who immediately accused the PSOE of leaking the document to the media.

According to Feijóo, the Minister of the Presidency threatened the PP’s Deputy Secretary for Institutions, Esteban González Pons, with bringing to light the document signed with Casado’s leadership if they did not reach an agreement on the Judiciary. “Mr. Bolaños said: either we reach an agreement or we filter the paper. They had threatened us that if the agreement they said was not reached, they would leak the paper. We do not filter papers, we make proposals ”, he has reproached.

In this sense, the party leader recalled that in mid-July they sent a document to the Government with a series of requirements and that in parallel the Government decided to make a “unilateral” modification that affected the governing body of the judges. On July 11, the PP sent a series of demands to its interlocutor to renew the Judiciary, with a mandate that had expired three and a half years ago, which included, among other issues, that it assume the commitment to remodel the formula for appointing members, in force for four decades. If this happens, Pons said at the time, the PP is “willing to negotiate the renewal of the CGPJ, the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court.” “Simultaneously,” he added, “we ask for reform of the Organic Law of the Judiciary to guarantee a regeneration of the CGPJ’s election model.”

The PP also introduced at that time within its demands for the renewal of the body that the Government withdraw the bill that it had sent to Parliament and approved the Senate at the beginning of July so that the acting Judiciary could elect two magistrates of the Constitutional Court.