A thousand days have now passed since the end of the constitutionally-mandated period for the renewal of Spain's General Council of the Judiciary, the state's highest organ of judicial control. Since January 2018, the president of the Council - who in turn is the president of the Supreme Court - along with twenty members of the body have remained in office, as the necessary two-thirds parliamentary majority cannot be achieved by the current government without the agreement of the main opposition party. And the Popular Party (PP) knows like no other how to pull the strings of the judicial fabric in which it always has a winning advantage because, if there is one Spanish institution which is conservative by nature, it is the judiciary.
Over the years, when the PP has lost power and felt threatened, they have made extremely skilful moves so that the game begins again. And so on, repeatedly. The Socialists (PSOE), for their part, have been so clumsy with their judicial renewal proposals that, even if they are in the right, when they have put their foot down it has looked like an attempt to screen the body ideologically and thus attack Spain's so-called judicial independence when, if something is missing in the state's senior judiciary, it is in fact the independence of which it boasts.
There is no serious country in our neighbourhood in which the renewal of fundamental institutions of the state, such as those of justice, is, as in Spain, in absolute limbo, pending an agreement between Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Casado. What is at stake is not trivial: the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court and the Court of Accounts. The first of these delivered the sentence for the independence leaders' trial and the last is responsible for imposing huge bond payments for the Catalan government's foreign publicity between 2011 and 2017. I mention this only by way of an inventory.
I have very little confidence that a renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary will offer a very different result on those issues where the judiciary has played a key role in recent years - a role even more powerful than politics - such as the repression of the Catalan independence movement, with sentences that were clearly disproportionate and unjust for the political prisoners. In this regard, if one talks about conservative and progressive judges, many of the differences are ideological and nuanced, and they don't refer to the subject of the "unity of Spain".
However, it is worth underlining that they have spent a thousand days without reaching agreement on judicial renewal. They, who do not tire of saying how "constitutionalist" they are, find themselves getting stuck when it comes to actually sharing power. At this point, the Spanish Constitution and its prescriptions are treated as having no importance at all. There are some things you don't play games with, they must think.