Ángel Collado
Pedro Sánchez has a lot of homework to do in Brussels before his six-month rotating presidency of the European Union, a performance on which he will build his great personal image offensive in order to continue at the head of the Government.
The head of the Executive, who has pending the renewal and reform of the General Council of the Judiciary, the governing body of the judges, now adds the rectification of the Penal Code to recover the sentences for embezzlement, relaxed five months ago at the request of his Catalan pro-independence allies.
The first subject that Sánchez drags has its origin in a lack of agreement with the main opposition party to elect the members of the CGPJ, a pending task since 2019. The PP does not want (nor does it suit him) a distribution by party quotas of the members of the Council and demands an added change in the election system that better guarantees the independence of the governing body of judges. The Executive does not want changes and only admits the automatic application to the Judiciary (by way of proposing magistrates who are more than like-minded) of the current parliamentary majority made up of the left-wing and pro-independence parties that support the left-wing coalition in power.
The European Commission had to intervene in view of the deadlock in the situation in Spain last autumn to urge the renewal of the governing body of judges within the parameters of the Union itself, with the guarantee that the majority of the members be elected by the judges themselves, not by the parties as Sanchez intends to maintain.
Since then, there has been no change of position and the deadline set by the Commission for the renewal and reform of the CGPJ is precisely the start of the rotating presidency that the Spanish Executive will hold as of July 1.
Without opening a negotiation or crossing a document with Alberto Núñez Feijóo to solve this problem, and despite the public pressures of the Commission, Sánchez now clashes with the demands of the Parliament in the fight against corruption.
The European Parlaiment is processing a regulation of obligatory compliance for the Member States that fixes the penalties for embezzlement at a minimum of 6 years in prison. This initiative is just the opposite of the reform of the Penal Code approved in the Congress by the Sanchist majority last December, in a hurry so that it would be forgotten before the elections of May 28, to the benefit of embezzlers.
At the demand of ERC, the party that leads the Generalitat, and as an overdue bill for the motion of censure that brought Sanchez to power in the 2018 motion of censure, the Government ended up fixing the criminal horizon for those responsible for the 2017 secessionist attempt in Catalonia. First were the pardons for the coup plotters, then the direct suppression of the Penal Code of the main crime committed, that of sedition, and finally the cheapening of the sentence for the other crime in which they incurred: that of embezzlement of public funds.
The penalties for embezzlement in the case that the official or politician uses public funds for purposes such as secession or the creation of institutions parallel to the official ones, as the current partners of Sánchez did, remain as a misdemeanor prosecuted with penalties two years below the minimum penalties of the future European regulations.
Inside the PSOE itself, some are scandalized by the tailor-made wording of the current Penal Code in matters of corruption. “To agree the penalties with the offender is to make them look at it”, commented the president of the Junta de Castilla-La Mancha, the socialist Emiliano García-Page upon learning of the project of the European Parliament.
In order to approve the new requirement that Brussels will propose, the Executive would only have to return to the provisions of the Penal Code in force until last year. And neither would it lack support in Congress, since the PP already offers its votes, although to make evident the dependence that the President of the Government has on the separatist parties.
With his sights set on the general elections at the end of the year and his plans to reissue his left-wing and pro-independence front, Sánchez is not willing to give up control of the judiciary, nor can he backtrack on his favors to ERC. It remains to be seen how his breaches are taken in the EU.
