Four days after the negotiations between the PSOE and the PP for the renewal of the Judiciary were blown up, we know the umpteenth version of one of its actors. The Institutional Deputy Secretary of the PP, Esteban González Pons, has pointed out that the agreement was far from being closed as soon as the Government maintained. “The Government had to give up one of its historical positions and accept that only the judges choose the judges,” he specified in an interview on Onda Cero. According to Pons, only in the event that the PSOE abided by a report from the CGPJ to support that option, there would have been white smoke. “The agreement was far from being finished, if the PSOE was not willing to give up what it has historically defended, there would have been no pact”, he has now predicted. Pons, who has led the negotiations on behalf of the Popular Party together with the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, has also specified the weight that the Government’s commitment to reform the crime of sedition had in breaking the agreement. This was Feijóo’s main argument and the one included in the PP statement last Thursday with which the talks were considered broken. “The lowering of sentences” for the crime of sedition and the possibility of entering “magistrates related to ERC” in the Constitutional Court was “from the beginning” in the negotiations.” This was discussed in the first meeting that Sánchez had and Feijóo in Moncloa, which Bolaños and I also attended. And it was agreed that the issue of sedition would not be touched upon,” commented Marlaska, Llop and Robles: the blockade by the minister judges González Pons has also revealed the “concern” of the judge ministers who are part of the Government (Margarita Robles, Fernando Grande-Marlaska and Pilar Llop) for a reform that directly affected them: their return to the judiciary when they leave politics. The ministers, always according to Pons’ version, opposed some of the requirements that were on the table because they changed their working conditions. Among those requirements were the impossibility of computing seniority while they were out of the judicial career, the impossibility of passing sentences for a time when they returned to their destinations and the need to compete again to recover the position. The discrepancies expressed by Marlaska, Llop and Robles stopped negotiations from moving forward earlier that week.