Justice has been giving bad news to the Government for many months. The Executive assumed the possibility that the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid would reject the complaint that, in an unprecedented manner, was presented by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, against Judge Juan Carlos Peinado, who has accused his wife, Begoña Gómez. . But what no one expected is that they did it with a very harsh order in which they turned against the president and even one of the judges suggested that a possible fine against the complainant should be studied. After reading the order, indignation grew in Sánchez’s entourage because the judges used clearly political and very unusual qualifiers. It is not the first time, in La Moncloa they were also outraged with other recent decisions of the Supreme Court, for example the one that disqualified the quality of the amnesty law and entered into rather political adjectives about its timeliness.
The most widespread interpretation within the Government, which is only hinted at in public, to avoid a greater conflict of powers, but is expressed more openly in private, is that a sector of justice is clearly opposed to the Executive and does not miss the opportunity to hit him when he has the chance. Some sectors of the Government doubted the opportunity to present complaints for prevarication because they considered them lost, since they practically never prosper, but in La Moncloa, among those who made the decision to go down this route, now unsuccessful, maintain that the objective was not It was both to win them and to reveal Judge Peinado’s actions, which they consider totally outside the norm and with political intentions.
The way of writing the order, with some unusual ellipses more typical of a political opinion column than an order, has baffled some members of the Government, who believe that the animosity is very evident. While the State Attorney General is accused of an alleged leak in the case of tax fraud against Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner, here they do not even consider that the leak of the images and audio of the interrogation of Sánchez represents any problem that needs to be investigated.
The underlying message that the Government conveys is that the judges, or at least some sector of the judges, have decided to engage in politics and influence their decisions to harm the Executive. “In the complaint filed, the true purpose of calling the President of the Government to testify in person was already warned: to turn that statement into an instrument to politically harm the Executive by instrumentalizing a judicial procedure,” say Government sources.
“Unfortunately, this suspicion has proven true. On the same day that the judge sent the statement to the private accusations (various far-right, fundamentalist and anti-vaccine organizations), it was leaked to numerous media outlets. We hope that what happened here contributes to the necessary social debate about the consequences of the strategy of the ultra-right and the extreme right based on the poisoning of coexistence and the unfounded and unproven harassment of progressive politicians and their families,” they conclude.
This is politically relevant for the Executive. Various members of the Government consulted believe that, although the blow that these judicial decisions represent, or the accusation of the attorney general, is evident, from the point of view of public debate it is becoming increasingly evident, in their view, the animosity of some conservative judges with the progressive Executive, and therefore, at least among the electorate that supports the Government, the effect of these decisions loses a lot of force. The Government thus assumes that the judicial side will give more bad news, but it trusts that the wear and tear expected by the opposition – Feijóo even spoke of Sánchez’s “judicial agony” on Wednesday in Congress – has reached its ceiling because the idea is installed in the progressive world that there is animosity against the Executive.
In any case, the atmosphere perceived in La Moncloa indicates that this avenue of resources seems exhausted and the Executive now only trusts that the Begoña Gómez case, which has brought obvious wear and tear and has given ammunition to the opposition, will gradually progress. little exhausting its path and finally being archived in a few months, although no one dares to make predictions after all the previous ones failed. After the Provincial Court gave him room to continue investigating, although in a limited way, and the Superior Court of Madrid has ruled out the prevarication with harsh arguments against the complainant, Peinado now has control again to move forward for several months. But in La Moncloa they remain convinced that there is no criminal element, as the two Civil Guard reports said, and therefore they continue to think that it is a matter of time, much longer than initially anticipated, but the end of the process can only be the archive.
