The news of the day reads as follows: "The four chosen for the Constitutional Court pass the examination in the Congress of Deputies accompanied by controversy." And thus, as quietly as this, the Spanish parliamentary lawyer, Enrique Arnaldo; the president of the criminal chamber of the National Audience court, Concepción Espejel; the judge and pioneer in the study and analysis of the gender perspective, Inmaculada Montalbán; and the judge of the criminal chamber of the National Audience court, Ramón Sáez Valcárcel, all of them selected by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and the Popular Party, in an agreement reached a couple of weeks ago, will take their places on the Constitutional Court.
The perversion of the system for electing members to the Constitutional Court, an indispensable organ in any advanced democracy as an interpreter of the state's Magna Carta, is of enormous gravity. People get chosen based on their ideological affiliation and, in some cases, it is difficult to justify them becoming part of the high court. Their pasts are full of situations that would invalidate them from holding office, as is widely evident in the case of Enrique Arnaldo and Concepción Espejel and not, however, in that of Ramón Sáez, but this is irrelevant to the agreement made by the leaderships of the two parties which have divided up all these positions since the start of the Spanish transition.
Not a single MP out of those who are examining and are familiar with the parties' pact went any further than asking the occasional awkward question. The agreement is the agreement and everyone is guided by their party loyalties with no wish to complicate matters, and in this way the Constitutional Court is renewed again and again. Then later we are surprised by pronouncements the court makes, or our attention is drawn to the whole series of irregularities by the Supreme Court that it has validated in relation to the Catalan political prisoners, many of which are already on their way to Europe and which the General Court of the European Union will surely overthrow.
But the members of the Constitutional Court see themselves, many of them, not as putting their prestige on the table but rather their commitment to the party that proposed them, knowing that when a crunch point is reached perhaps they won't even be there and, if they are, they might have to weather the storm but the Spanish political-media environment will protect them and they will get away with it despite what they have ended up putting their signature to at the bottom of the page. This is the truth, unfortunately, and the most worrying thing is that it is not certain, either, that a different form of selection would help the court's members gain in independence or objectivity.
Because, in the end, the problem, in many cases, is not their conservative or progressive ideology but a lack of independence when it comes to their decisions. The circle is hard to break between the nominator and the nominee. From here to the discredit of the Constitutional Court there is only one step. But the parties, the PSOE and the PP, are enormously happy: they know, or think they know, that the judges will never fail them.