The members of the progressive wing of the CGPJ include their candidate for the TC in the extraordinary plenary session this afternoon

The Council will vote this Tuesday for the first time its candidates for the TC with little expectation of success

MADRID, 20 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The members of the progressive wing of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) have included their candidate --Supreme Court magistrate José Manuel Bandrés-- on the agenda of the extraordinary plenary session to be held this Tuesday at 5:00 p.m. to elect to the two magistrates who correspond to designate the governing body of judges for the Constitutional Court, according to sources from the CGPJ to Europa Press.

Until now, only the Supreme Court (TS) magistrates César Tolosa and Pablo Lucas, both proposed by the conservative bloc, were listed as candidates on the agenda. The name of Bandrés -which the progressive sector had revealed on November 3-- has been added this Tuesday, since there is a deadline until 5:00 p.m. for the members to present more applicants.

According to the aforementioned sources, despite the fact that there are already three names on the table, the two candidates for the TC are not expected to emerge from this afternoon's meeting, which would mean postponing the negotiations and the eventual appointment to 2023, because --of fail this Tuesday-- it is not expected to take up the matter again in the ordinary plenary session set for Thursday.

This afternoon's debate will take place just 24 hours after the Constitutional Court has suspended the parliamentary process, already in the Senate, of the two amendments that modify the system of election and arrival of candidates to the TC to achieve its renewal.

This urgent meeting was convened last week at the request of nine of the ten conservative members of the CGPJ, after correcting the formal error pointed out to them by the interim president of the Council, Rafael Mozo, who initially refused to convene the extraordinary plenary session because these nine members did not propose any candidate.

The sources consulted by Europa Press explain that, with this movement, the conservative members intended to force their progressive colleagues to withdraw Bandrés's candidacy so that they would support Lucas, who was on the first list of nine applicants released by the progressive members. last October.

And this because the reform proposed by PSOE and Unidas Podemos (UP), in two amendments to the bill that repeals sedition, would change the 'modus operandi', going from a majority of three fifths (11 of the 18 votes at stake ) to a simple one, which would favor the election of the two candidates with the most votes for each block, in the case of the progressive sector: Bandrés.

Faced with the haste of the conservative members, their progressive peers - who until the proposed reform urged proceeding with the two appointments to the TC - now advocated waiting not only for the ordinary plenary session on December 22 in the CGPJ, but even for that the Cortes Generales approved the change of system to vote now with the new rules.

However, the decision adopted on Monday night by the TC, after more than nine hours of intense debate between its eleven magistrates, could lead to another exchange of roles between the two currents of the CGPJ, according to the aforementioned sources.

The conservative majority of the Constitutional Court, made up of six magistrates, agreed to stop the parliamentary processing of both amendments, thus estimating the very precautionary measures requested by the PP in its appeal against the aforementioned reform.

This is an unprecedented decision of the TC -in its more than 40 years of history it had never urgently suspended a parliamentary debate in the Cortes Generales-, which could now lead the conservative block of the CGPJ to slow down and the progressive wing to speed up.

The underlying problem is that the Constitutional Court has been waiting since June 12 for the renewal of the four magistrates who make up the third that the Constitution mandates to replace the Government and CGPJ: Pedro González-Trevijano and Antonio Narváez, appointed in their day by the Executive of Mariano Rajoy; and Juan Antonio Xiol and Santiago Martínez-Vares, appointed at the time by the governing body of the judges.

The legal doubts about the possibility that the two Moncloa candidates could take office without waiting for the two from the CGPJ led to the promotion and approval last July in Parliament of an express reform of the Organic Law of the Judiciary (LOPJ) to return to the Council his power to appoint his two applicants to the court of guarantees.

However, the negotiations within the CGPJ ran aground on December 2 due to the tacit veto of the conservative block to Bandrés, and the refusal of the progressive members to once again fatten their list of applicants (which came to have nine), which led the government parties to launch their reform proposal.