The revelation by EL PAÍS this Tuesday that there was a pact between the government and the PP signed in October 2021 to reform the judiciary law has led to the first internal conflict in the PP since the arrival of Alberto Núñez Feijóo led in the party presidency. The leaders of Pablo Casado and Feijóo have become entangled over this agreement after the PP leader accused his predecessor Pablo Casado and former PP Secretary General Teodoro García Egea of signing a pact with the executive to close it in front of the popular leadership hide; both the old and the new dome, as well as himself. Casado’s management – through former Deputy Communications Minister Pablo Montesinos, who is very close to the ousted leader – has denied that he had not informed the newcomer of everything going on with this one matter to do. “The legal issues were transferred from the actors involved, including the whole judicial issue,” Montesinos told EL PAÍS.
The first to shoot at his predecessors in the leadership of the PP to distance themselves from the pact they made with the government of Pedro Sánchez in autumn 2021 was Feijóo himself. The leader of the PP reiterated this Thursday: that he was unaware of the document of the agreement published by that newspaper – although his negotiator on the matter, Esteban González Pons, admitted yesterday that he had seen it – and had accused Casado and García of signing a pact by Egea that would give leadership to the PP was unknown. “What members of the previous Management Committee told me is that none of them discussed any issue signed between the Minister and the Secretary General of the PP,” Feijóo said in statements to the media in Porto do Son (A Coruña). “When I sent the transfer of power to Casado, there was no way he gave me a document or specified an agreement,” he said.
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In this way, Feijóo accuses the two leaders of the former leadership of the PP of hatching a secret pact even for his own party, which incidentally would not have been revealed to him when he took office as president in April of this year. The popular leader claims that his predecessor, who was ousted from the political organization after his internal war with Isabel Díaz Ayuso, carried out a partial delegation of powers and concealed from him something as relevant as a written agreement signed by his right at the time . Mann, Teodoro García Egea, with the Minister of the Presidency of Pedro Sánchez’s government, Félix Bolaños.
EL PAÍS tried to get Pablo Casado’s version on the matter but received no reply. However, one of the most trusted leaders of the former leader of the PP during his tenure, Pablo Montesinos – his head of communications and one of the few believers who stayed by his side to the end – claims that the delegation of powers was exemplary and all the information related to it was communicated. “I know there was communication between the party’s previous leadership, between the secretary-general and our chief of justice, and the new leaders of the matter. And then, let’s see, the Speaker of Parliament hasn’t changed. Cuca Gamarra was a spokesman for Pablo Casado and is a spokesman for Feijóo”, he has found ample in La Sexta. However, Gamarra assures that she was not aware of the deal until the Presidency Minister told her about it. “It’s wrong. I wasn’t aware, it was Bolaños, like Pons, who told me about him,” he tells EL PAÍS. Other sources from previous management claim that Gamarra brought the agreement to the attention of their day became.
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The episode reveals the tension that exists between the PP’s former leadership – whose departure was traumatic – and Feijóo’s current leadership, which could pose problems for the conservative leader in the future. Also that the popular leader has difficulty arguing why the PP still disagrees with the CGPJ government, despite having done so in the past.
Feijóo has tried to distance himself from the agreement, insisting that the government did not attach any value to the document revealed by EL PAÍS because Sánchez and he were present at his first private meeting with the President last April “resumption of Talks” on the General Council of the Judiciary. “We fled before the end of the negotiations because we started a new phase,” Feijóo defended. However, government sources insist that during the private meetings that Félix Bolaños held with the top PP leaders after Feijóo became PP president (Cuca Gamarra and Esteban González Pons), the signed document was on the table. However, the chairman of the PP repeatedly publicly asserts that he had no knowledge of the text. “Obviously I didn’t know about this document because nobody gave it to me,” he repeated today.
Since EL PAÍS published this Tuesday the text signed by García Egea and Félix Bolaños in autumn 2021, the PP has offered different versions of the terms of the agreement. On Tuesday, the Deputy Secretary for Regional Coordination of the PP, Pedro Rollán, stated that “no member of the government had referred to any previously signed document”. On the other hand, the institution’s deputy secretary, Esteban González Pons, admitted a day later, on Wednesday, that the minister of the presidency showed him the document at their first meeting and asked him to comply with it. Now Feijóo chooses to accuse his predecessor of hiding it from him and his own party’s former leadership.
The leader of the PP also explained this Thursday his conditions for approving the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), which the population has opposed for more than three years. Those are four demands the PP wrote in a seven-page document it released last July, just before breaking off negotiations with the government. Although the document contains other demands, Feijóo has only named four today. First, judges appointed to politically elected office may only return to active service after two years have elapsed. Second, those who have held political office in the immediately preceding five years cannot be appointed members of the CGPJ. Also, that the Presidents of the room have 25 years of service. And finally, the creation of a thousand new judgeships over the next five years.
The popular leader has avoided mentioning the reform approved by the government in July in order to be able to renew only the judges of the Constitutional Court, a reform that the PP wanted to withdraw in order to resume talks with the government. However, party sources have indicated that their position has not changed at all and that the claim is “fully valid”.
The pact to renew the CGPJ therefore returns to impasse, with the innovation that the PP is involved in internal disputes to circumvent the fact that the previous leadership had signed a written agreement with the government from which the current one differs party distanced.