I was all so agreed and scheduled that it was not even necessary to wait for the debate to vote on the renewal of the Constitutional Court (TC). The deputies did so telematically from Wednesday night until one in the afternoon on Thursday, a vote in secret theory but which ceased to be so for the socialists because the PSOE decided that the ballots should be known by the parliamentary group to avoid defections . Even so, the deputy Odón Elorza announced that he had not voted for the controversial candidate proposed by PP Enrique Arnaldo. In Unidos Podemos (UP) another deputy at least also broke voting discipline. In total, there were, in the case of Arnaldo, 11 desertions of 249 voters.
Since Arnaldo’s proposal was known, numerous information has been published, many of them in THE PERIOD OF SPAIN, which place it as a not a suitable candidate to be part of the TC, among them that he has combined his work as a lawyer in the Courts and the legal profession in a private office, and that his company –Estudios Jurídicas y Procesales, SL– carried out 562 professional services between 2002 and 2009 for dozens of public administrations, the majority in the hands of the PP, which awarded him jobs for about one million euros. Arnaldo had relationships and businesses with former Balearic president Jaume Matas, convicted of corruption, and with former Madrid president Ignacio González, imprisoned for corruption, and his name appears in the cases ‘Palma Arena’ and ‘Lezo’. In addition, he hid in his resume sent to Congress that at least until 2020 he continued to appear as a joint administrator of the aforementioned company.
It is not strange, then, to conclude that the Government, the PSOE and UP have had to swallow a toad with this appointment. However, the two parties of the coalition government have applied a kind of theory of the lesser evil because Arnaldo’s rejection could have again blocked the renewal of three institutions (TC, Court of Accounts and Ombudsman) due to the blackmail of the PP. The Government and the parties in favor of the pact consider that the rejection could have also led to the definitive blockade of the General Council of the Judiciary, on which there are negotiations again.
Whether they want it or not, these matches are at least accomplices of the PP, ultimately responsible for the proposal of such a debatable candidate and pose it as a swallow between the election or the blockade. It is not a question here of assessing the ideological sensitivity of one or another candidate from which one can obviously disagree and provide the corresponding support, but rather of verifying that the parties they pervert the spirit of the norm constitutional law that requires qualified majorities in the election of members of certain bodies that must respond to parliamentary representation but not partisan. This perverse application of the Constitution turns the majority into simple fees instead of forcing consensus based on candidates who, from diverse sensitivities, have the necessary qualification but also a institutional imprint that Arnaldo lacks as they have lacked on other occasions candidates endorsed by other parties, also the PSOE. It is true that the blockade is a specialty of the PP, but submitting time and again to this kind of blackmail it does not contribute to recovering the necessary prestige of the institutions, but quite the opposite. Appealing to pragmatism is nothing more than a sample of that cynicism that distances citizens from politics.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com