Depoliticising Spain's judicial council (CGPJ): European models and the stalled 2024 reform

When Miriam González launched Democracia 21 in Madrid on 10 October, one of her demands was a depoliticised General Council of the Judiciary, the CGPJ, and she added a detail other parties tend to skip: depoliticised from the judges' associations as well. It is a good place to start, because Spain has been arguing about this body for forty years and has a fresh, very concrete chance to settle it.

How Spain got here

The CGPJ governs the judiciary. It makes the senior judicial appointments, Supreme Court judges included, and runs the judicial career. It has twenty members: twelve judges and eight jurists. Until 1985 the judges elected the twelve judicial members themselves. That year's Organic Law of the Judiciary moved the whole election to Parliament, where each chamber picks its share by three-fifths. The Constitutional Court accepted the change in 1986, while warning, in the Venice Commission's summary, that sharing out seats as political quotas could risk politicisation.

That is exactly what happened. In practice three-fifths means the PSOE and the PP have to agree, and they negotiate the names as a package. When they stop agreeing, nothing happens at all. The council's mandate expired in December 2018. Its president resigned in October 2022. The deadlock ended only on 25 June 2024, when Félix Bolaños and Esteban González Pons signed a deal in Brussels after five months of talks mediated by the European Commission. Parliament elected the new council on 25 July 2024, and Isabel Perelló became its president.

The deal came with a law, Organic Law 3/2024, that is more interesting than the coverage suggested. It bars anyone who has been a minister, MP or senior regional official in the previous five years from becoming a lay member. It requires a three-fifths majority inside the council for senior appointments. And it gave the council six months to propose a new system for electing its judicial members, one that could earn a positive assessment in the Commission's Rule of Law report and match the best European standards.

What Europe says, and where the reform stands

The council met its deadline. In February 2025 it unanimously sent the government and Parliament a text with two families of options, one where Parliament still intervenes and one where neither the legislature nor the executive takes part at any stage. At Spain's request, the Venice Commission examined the two concrete proposals and published its opinion in October 2025. Option 1, in which candidates endorsed by 25 judges or an association are elected directly by all judges, complies with the European standard of peer election. Option 2, in which judges vote a shortlist and Parliament makes the final choice, does not: Parliament keeps broad discretion, there is no anti-deadlock mechanism, and pre-selection by judges is valuable but insufficient.

The yardstick is the Council of Europe's recommendation that no less than half the members of judicial councils be judges elected by their peers. Italy is the familiar example: two thirds of its Consiglio superiore della magistratura are elected by the magistrates and one third by Parliament. In March 2026 Italian voters rejected, by 53.7 per cent, Giorgia Meloni's reform that would have split the council in two and filled it partly by drawing lots, which shows how much citizens care about who governs the judges. Ireland went another way in 2023 with a Judicial Appointments Commission of four judges and four lay members, chaired by the Chief Justice.

In Spain the reform has stalled. The Commission's 2026 Rule of Law report, published in July, says no consensus has been found to finish the process, although a parliamentary group tabled two peer-election bills in Congress and the Senate in autumn 2025. Meanwhile the renewed council has made 196 senior appointments, most of them by broad consensus, which is good news, though stakeholders told the Commission that factors other than merit still weigh.

Who should govern the judges

Peer election has a well-known weakness, and the Venice Commission names it. Four associations cover 58 per cent of active judges, and at least two of them may be closely linked to the conservative or progressive camps. Under direct election, associations could act as proxies for political actors. González is right to say the council has to be depoliticised from them too.

This is where the synthesis matters. The left has long worried, with reason, that a judiciary which governs itself can become a closed corporation, and that the body running it needs democratic legitimacy and has to answer for its choices. The right and the liberal tradition put judicial independence and the rule of law first: politicians should not pick the people who appoint the judges who may one day try them. Fukuyama's framework, which we explained on day 8, needs both, a law that binds rulers and rulers who answer to citizens. The idea from neither camp is to design the election itself so that neither parties nor associations can capture it.

Our version takes the Venice-compliant Option 1 and adds the safeguards the opinion asks for. The twelve judicial members are elected by all judges, with low endorsement thresholds so that any judge with modest support can stand, voting that represents judges proportionally, fair and publicly financed campaigns, and a guaranteed mix of court levels, regions and gender. Association membership is published next to each candidate, so voters know it. The eight lay members stay with Parliament, by three-fifths, from a shortlist drawn up by an independent panel, with a three-month deadline and a default to the panel's top candidate, the same design we proposed for Spain's watchdogs. Every senior appointment the council makes comes with published reasons, and the council's president reports to Parliament once a year.

There is a reason to care beyond Spain's internal fights. John Rawls, who is on this week's reading list, asked how citizens with incompatible worldviews can share institutions they all see as legitimate. A judges' council seen by half the country as belonging to the other half fails that test, whoever happens to control it. A council chosen by rules both halves can accept passes it. Spain already has the diagnosis, a law that demands a reform, an expert opinion and two bills. What it lacks is the agreement to finish, and that agreement is the first thing any party serious about institutional clean-up should offer.