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The umpteenth turn of the screw of the Popular Party regarding the blockade for the renewal of the General Council of Judicial Power illuminates a new excuse: that Alberto Núñez Feijóo was unaware of the agreement reached between his party and the Government in October 2021 because the previous direction of Pablo Casado he didn’t realize it. “When I met with Mr. Casado, he did not talk to me about any agreement or give me any document,” the PP leader publicly alleged this Thursday, disregarding that pact.
Feijóo: no to everything with better words than Casado
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These statements have especially bothered in the environment of his predecessor. The previous direction of Casado interprets that the new excuse put forward by Feijóo implies a veiled accusation of obscurantism and lack of transparency in the transition process, something that they flatly deny. In fact, as elDiario.es has been able to verify, the former popular secretary general, Teodoro García Egea, held several coordination meetings with Feijóo’s right-hand man, Esteban González Pons, and one of them dealt specifically with judicial matters. Asked by this newspaper, González Pons did not deny that meeting or that he was personally informed of the agreement by García Egea, although he preferred not to offer any assessment in this regard.
According to sources from the previous Genoa leadership, García Egea gave him details of the state of the negotiations with the Government in many areas and, specifically, of the agreement reached to renew the leadership of the judges. And they also remember that the current parliamentary spokesperson for the popular party, Cuca Gamarra, was also part of that leadership and had all the information about it, something that Gamarra’s team denies.
This Thursday, the former deputy secretary of the PP Pablo Montesinos defended that “a transfer of powers of the different branches was carried out and one of them was, of course, judicial matters.” “I know that there was communication between the former responsible for the matter and the new ones. And the parliamentary spokeswoman has not changed. That dialogue did take place in all matters, another thing is that they wanted to start the negotiation from scratch, ”said Montesinos on laSexta.
The Government, meanwhile, again makes Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s attitude ugly by maintaining the blockade established by Pablo Casado to constitutional bodies such as the CGPJ and directly accuses the opposition leader of lying and of “not being trustworthy”. Executive sources assure, in fact, that both Cuca Gamarra and Esteban González Pons were not only aware of the agreement reached in October 2021, but also had the signed document in their possession because they came with a copy of it to the meetings of negotiation with Minister Félix Bolaños once the change in leadership of the PP has been completed.
“It was not discussed in the steering committee”
Now from the PP they try to stick to the literalness of Feijóo’s words to be ambiguous about whether or not they really knew about the agreement, alleging that the only thing the opposition leader assures is that the agreement reached with the Government for the renewal of the CGPJ , and which was signed by Teodoro García Egea and Félix Bolaños, was never dealt with by the Popular Party leadership committee. “No document or issue signed between the minister and the former general secretary of the party was discussed in any steering committee,” Feijóo himself emphasized on Thursday. Sources of the current presidency of the popular ones also point out that Pedro Sánchez made no mention of that document during the meeting between the two at the Moncloa palace.
From the previous management they admit that the negotiations with the Government for matters such as the renewal of the CGPJ were carried out in a “very discreet” manner to maintain the confidentiality of the conversations between García Egea and Bolaños, but they clarify that the fact that they were not openly debated in a steering committee does not imply “at all” that they did not move to the new leadership of the party or that a position of such relevance as the parliamentary spokesperson was not aware of it.
This last chapter of an institutional blockade that will last four years comes under the opposition leadership of an Alberto Núñez Feijóo who took office with an air of moderation and promising to contribute to “remove politics from confrontation” from “the sense of State” . In an interview granted to the newspaper El Mundo in June, his most trusted man and new institutional deputy secretary, Esteban González Pons, came to present an amendment to the entire position maintained by Pablo Casado regarding the blockade of the CGPJ: “ The CGPJ must be renewed applying the current law. Defending that the Council is not renewed and the law is not applied is inappropriate for a legislator. If the legislator does not like the law, he changes it. But while the law is law, it applies it”, assured González Pons emphatically.
Five months have passed since Feijóo’s arrival in office and, for now, the excuses of the PP follow one another while the law remains unfulfilled. In the Government they intensify the pressure so that the main opposition party agrees, finally, to the unblocking of the governing body of the judges. Although, in reality, within the Executive itself, it is beginning to be assumed that as the months go by, the possibilities diminish as much as the hope of a “new PP” that is more open to dialogue and more prone to understanding. And even more so at the gates of an electoral cycle for which the conservatives seem to promise them very happily.
