November 20, 2025, the same day that marked 50 years since Franco’s death, “was a sad day for democracy”, confesses a Supreme Court judge from anonymity. On that important day, the highest level of Spanish justice convicted, for the first time in history, a state attorney general. The roar of a huge chasm that was opening shook the country. The two Spains emerged reflected in two groups of robes: five magistrates of the Second Section of the Supreme Court who decided to sentence Álvaro García Ortiz to two years of disqualification and a 7,200 euro fine for having revealed confidential data and the only two progressives who will express their disagreement with a private vote.
The cava has also spread to the political and social right, which for some time has been treating the head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office as a “criminal” calling him Alvarone. The president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, whose boyfriend, tried for tax crimes, was a public prosecutor, celebrated the sentence with her well-known thesis according to which Spain has become a dictatorship.
The socialist part of the government, whose president had proclaimed the prosecutor’s innocence in the middle of the trial, tried to hide its indignation. But that feeling overflowed in a way that had rarely been seen in progressive Spain in recent times. The fact that García Ortiz was convicted without clear evidence incriminating him for the leak of an email from Ayuso’s boyfriend, while the trial gathered exculpatory testimony from several journalists, contributed to the feeling of anger and amazement that invaded party headquarters and social networks. To add to the confusion, the sentence was made public without explaining the reasons, while waiting for the sentence to be written.
On Saturday itself, the second vice president and leader of the Sumar Movement, Yolanda Díaz, accused some judges of “suspending their constitutional functions to intervene in politics.” In the PP, deputy secretary Carmen Fúnez denounced that Pedro Sánchez “has weakened all the counter-powers of the State”.
A bitter division that was also present in the media. Members of the court have already expressed during the hearing their “astonishment” at the very discrepant versions of the trial provided in the media and in political meetings. “There is an atrocious division, it seems that they are witnessing two different trials,” one of them was surprised. “The sentence, whatever it is, will be an attack on another. If we condemn, some will attack us and if we acquit, the others will attack us.”
After the bomb explosion on 20 N, the judges of the Supreme Court consulted admit their “concern” about the image of polarization of justice that has been conveyed. When citizens’ opinion on the Administration of Justice is already low: it is by far the worst rated public service, with 71.5% failing, according to the CIS. Among judges with progressive sensibilities, a general feeling of “absolute anger” is evident. Barely an hour after García Ortiz’s conviction was published, the progressive Judges and Judges for Democracy party released a statement from its spokesperson, Edmundo Rodríguez, entitled: “With this sentence we all lose.” Rodríguez regretted the division of the Supreme Court and warned that the sentence “will not be understood by a large part of society, convinced of the innocence of the attorney general.”
Other progressive High Court judges call for “restraint.” “It is dangerous to remove the system,” says one of them, who admits his “desolation” at the possible loss of faith in justice. This magistrate, like others consulted, assures that the conviction was not due to ideological reasons, but admits that the fact that the conservatives signed it and only the two progressives proposed acquittal does not strengthen this thesis. “We progressives at the Supreme Court defend the Chamber. Everything is always resolved in judicial terms. But the image is devastating because the two progressives acquit and the conservatives condemn”, he warns.
Justice and politics have long seemed to walk hand in hand in Spain. As if politics had become judicialized and justice politicized. Court cases involving the government almost exclusively fuel the discourse of the PP opposition. There is an issue whose scope is not even discussed by the Executive: the corrupt conspiracy involving the two previous organizational secretaries of the PSOE. But other episodes that feed the PP’s menu inoculate the government and the left in general with a feeling of persecution. The extravagances of judge Juan Carlos Peinado in his persistent harassment of the president’s wife or the imminent trial against Sánchez’s brother after a complaint brought, as in the previous case, by far-right activists, add to the grievances. Like the myriad of cases opened against the leaders of Podemos which failed after fueling the most scandalous headlines.
Before the attorney general’s case, the Supreme Court had also become embroiled in the controversy. For decisions such as the convictions of the former Andalusian presidents Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán for the ERE case or of the Podemos deputy Alberto Rodríguez – deprived of his seat – later annulled by a Constitutional Court (TC) with a progressive majority (once again deciding ideological affiliation). Or for the Supreme Court’s refusal to apply the amnesty law to the Catalan independence activists, against which, even before it was approved by Congress, judges from all over Spain demonstrated in their robes. Another judge, this one from the National Tribunal, Manuel García Castellón, had already attempted to torpedo him on the eve of Sánchez’s investiture, whose support depended on that pardon measure.
What happened with the amnesty is directly linked to the large role that judges took on in response to the amnesty processes. A public prosecutor who knows him firsthand sums it up like this: “This has changed the nature of justice in Spain. The political power was incapable of responding to a political problem and delegated it to the judges. Since then they have assumed a power that they no longer want to give up.”
Sánchez’s first six years were marked by an institutional anomaly: the PP’s blocking of the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), which allowed him to maintain the majority to control the appointments of Supreme Court judges. An agreement in principle had been reached between PSOE and PP to renew the Council in November 2018, but the agreement was frustrated after a message was leaked from the then popular Senate speaker, Ignacio Cosidó, boasting that his party would control the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court “from the back door”. The person chosen to chair the CGPJ was Manuel Marchena, one of the participants in the last major decisions of the High Court, from the amnesty law to the conviction of García Ortiz.
The PP argues that, to depoliticize justice, appointments should be left in the hands of the judges themselves. His speech that Sánchez attacks the independence of the judiciary was supported by government appointments that were difficult to defend: Dolores Delgado and Juan Carlos Campo went from justice ministers to attorney general, in the first case, and to magistrate TC, in the second. Also for those statements by Sánchez in which he boasted that the Prosecutor’s Office depends on him.
Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, professor of Political Science at the Carlos III University, uses a sociological fact: Spain is, together with Bulgaria, the European country with the highest number of legal disputes. “We are a very loving country,” he emphasizes. And let’s remember that Sánchez came to power with a judicial ruling on the corruption of the PP, which now seeks revenge. The political scientist underlines that the climate of political confrontation leads to a “generalized mistrust” and a “civil inability” to judge certain behaviors, which means that responsibility is delegated to the courts. The polarization has leaked out “in the judiciary, in the security forces or in the bodies of senior state officials”. An idea that a veteran Supreme Court justice reinforces when referring to his colleagues who have arrived in recent years: “A judge has to be impervious to ideological or partisan issues, but some newer ones are very open to this kind of thing.”
García Ortiz ended up on the bench for the response that denied a hoax by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Ayuso’s chief of staff, when he and the president herself denounced a “state operation” against her boyfriend. An issue that raises uncertainty among some Supreme Court judges, who hope it will be resolved when the ruling is published. “It is difficult to understand what mechanisms exist when a hoax that goes against an institution is launched. Let’s see what the court says. But how do we do it? The limits of what we can do in these cases are not clear to me”, says a magistrate who is not part of the Criminal Court and who raises another doubt. “What evidence needs to be there to consider that there is enough evidence to convict? I don’t know.” The same source adds: “Those of us who do not deal with criminal law always think that it is fortunate to be able to resort to ‘in dubio pro reo’ (the principle according to which in case of doubt we rule in favor of the prisoner). In other areas we do not have this possibility to resolve doubtful cases”. Faced with controversy over the Chamber’s decision to bring forward the ruling when the ruling is still being drafted, High Court sources argue that this practice is frequent in matters “of great public importance”. The same sources underline that the Criminal Chamber dealt with the cases of La Manada or the ERE. However, those sentences resolved appeals against the resolutions of lower bodies, so those affected already knew the arguments for their conviction, which is not the case now. “The advancement of the sentence is something exceptional and it is not clear whether it was justified in a case of such importance,” admits a magistrate.
In addition to losing his job, García Ortiz will have to pay 10,000 euros in compensation and pay a few thousand more to Ayuso’s boyfriend’s lawyer. Alberto González Amador tearfully testified at the trial, where he also said that banks had stopped financing him since his tax fraud was discovered. A day before the sentence was pronounced, EL PAÍS published that González Amador had purchased the luxury penthouse where he lives with Ayuso, valued at one million euros, after obtaining a mortgage of 600,000. His trial for tax fraud is still ongoing for a long time.
