Rise and fall of Spain's Constitutional Court (Juan Carlos Girauta in El Debate)

Juan Carlos Girauta argues in El Debate that Spain's Constitutional Court has gone from being a respected judicial body to one occupied by a majority willing to declare an amnesty constitutional. He brands Conde Pumpido as incompatible with democracy.

The article by **Juan Carlos Girauta** published in **El Debate** on **October 13, 2026** under the title «Rise and fall of the Constitutional Court» opens with a personal confession: the author was trained in respect for the Kelsenian model, the one that envisaged a judicial body separate from the judiciary and capable of striking down laws contrary to the Constitution. Rather than a conventional legal analysis, the piece is a settling of scores with a naivety he admits he once professed.

## The Article 159.2 model and faith in the political filter

Girauta recalls that **Article 159.2 of the Constitution** requires Constitutional Court judges to be jurists of recognized competence with more than **fifteen years** of professional experience. That filter, combined with the distribution of candidates among Congress, Senate, the **CGPJ** (Spain's judicial governing council) and the Government, seemed to him a reasonable safeguard. Not because the parties were virtuous, but because he trusted the institutional judgment of those putting forward their nominees.

The author admits that today that faith sounds like a bad joke. He understands why young people or those without legal training might burst out laughing at the news that someone genuinely believed in the merits of that formula. He accepts the mockery. But he asks for context: having been, in the late **seventies**, in a classroom at what was then the **Universidad Central de Barcelona**, listening to a professor who was one of the fathers of the Constitution, to understand the founding glow of that young democracy.

## The question nobody asked: amnesty and sectarianism

The text poses an uncomfortable question. How did no one think about what would happen if the Court came to be occupied by a majority of charlatans capable of declaring an amnesty constitutional? Girauta calls that idea abhorrent to anyone who has spent a few minutes reflecting with the Constitution in hand. Two minutes, he writes, were enough to consider the scenario.

He also wonders how no one foresaw that the alternative use of the law would go from being an interesting debate to an institutional and political catastrophe. The point is no small one: the author is not talking about a minor miscalculation, but about a structural fault that time has turned into reality.

## Conde Pumpido, the lifetime salary and the break with Kelsen

The article points directly at **Conde Pumpido**. Girauta claims that the president of the Constitutional Court answers to another boss, **Sánchez**, and aspires only to an untouchable salary as a lifetime member of the **Consejo de Estado** (Spain's Council of State, the government's top advisory body). He also mentions the placement of a son, without giving further details.

The criticism hardens when the author writes that Conde Pumpido considers himself the measure of democracy. Girauta argues that he is incompatible with it and that everything will be recovered. Except that faith in **Kelsen** from when, he says, we were young idealists. The closing is not an academic conclusion: it is the bitter realization of someone who sees the pact he believed foundational broken.

In short, the piece does not discuss a specific ruling or a particular appointment. It questions whether the Constitutional Court's institutional design still serves the purpose it was created for, or whether, on the contrary, it has become an instrument at the service of political majorities. It is a signed opinion, not a court ruling, and should be read as such.