After five plenary sessions and the agreement of the members to integrate new candidates to the initially agreed list, the plenary session of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) elected Isabelle Perello as the new president of the governing body of judges and the Supreme Court, making her the first woman to lead the High Court. The appointment was made with 16 of the possible 20 votes, four more than the necessary majority.
The election, which takes place just forty-eight hours before the opening ceremony of the judicial year that the King will preside over, ends the impasse that had led to the bitterness of the progressive group towards two specific candidates: Pilar Teso and Ana Ferrer, both rejected by the conservative group because of their strong profile and because they are candidates for the government. The successive votes that the seven candidates initially proposed by the members have undergone in the various plenary sessions have made it necessary to address yesterday, Monday, the opportunity to open the range of candidates to carry out the negotiation and place the election in a new direction. round of voting with the incorporation of this judge associated with Judges for Democracy for more than thirty years. Until now, in the successive plenary sessions, Pilar Teso and Pablo Lucas had faced each other with ten votes, and in a final vote, yesterday afternoon, Ana Ferrer and Carmen Lamela, also with ten votes. The permanent division of the Plenary made it necessary to activate a plan (that of integrating new candidates) that had already been brewing within the conservative bloc since last August 19, the Plenary for the election of the president failed once again. The members of this bloc saw in Perelló a consensus candidate who could respond to the demand of the progressives to be a woman and at the same time find greater acceptance among the progressive members than that found by the judge of the CNI Pablo Lucas. The name proposal was presented by Alejandro Abascal, although the creator of this “third way” was José Antonio Montero, also a member of the conservative group.
Sources from the conservative group assure that the pressure exerted by the government on its members during the last weekend “was enormous” and that at times the negotiations were so blocked that the progressive bloc even suggested that the conservatives had nothing to propose to anyone, but limited themselves to deciding between Teso and Ferrer, their two candidates.
For the first time since 2019, the judicial year begins without an interim president, since the last five times it was the interim presidents (four times Lesmes and once Marín Castán) who had to give the opening speech of the judicial year. Given the impasse in which the negotiations between conservatives and progressives have been taking place since the end of July, the Supreme Court had already planned a plan B and Marín Castán had prepared his speech.
