That has never happened before at the military parade on the Spanish national holiday.

The seat of the country's most important judge, not far from King Felipe, will remain empty this Wednesday.

Out of protest and frustration, Carlos Lesmes has thrown the nugget at the feet of the government and the opposition: The President of the Supreme Court and the "General Council of the Judiciary" (CGPJ), Carlos Lesmes, has resigned.

The 64-year-old judge accused politicians of "indifference" to a situation that "weakens and undermines the most important institutions of justice and the rule of law".

The blockade of the judiciary has been going on for four years.

Since 2018, the mandate of Lesmes and the General Council he led expired.

The task of the highest self-governing body of the Spanish judiciary is to ensure the independence of the courts.

But the standstill means that two constitutional judges cannot be appointed.

More than a dozen posts are vacant on the Supreme Court, where cases are piling up.

Nothing is going on with other judicial bodies either.

Lesmes had been threatening to resign since September.

Neither Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's ruling socialist PSOE party nor the opposition People's Party (PP) took this seriously.

On Monday, Sánchez hastily invited opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo to crisis talks.

The head of government had not spoken personally to the PP chairman for 167 days.

After three hours they announced a "last try".

Progress has been made in reorganizing the Judicial Council and the Constitutional Court, in which the appointment of four judges is long overdue.

The constitutional court has therefore postponed the fundamental judgments on euthanasia, school reform and abortion rights.

EU commissioner threatens Spain

The EU Commission has long since lost patience with Spain.

At the end of September, EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders made an unsuccessful attempt at mediation.

"All means will be used against Spain if there is no renewal and reform of the Judicial Council," he had threatened in the summer, which sounded like infringement proceedings.

In September, EU Vice-President Vera Jourová criticized the "catastrophic situation" of the Spanish judiciary.

On his departure from Madrid, Reynders merely recommended urgently that the Judicial Council be renewed immediately and reform the election of judges “immediately afterwards”.

So far, the PP has insisted on first changing the electoral process in order to strengthen the independence of the judiciary: judges and prosecutors should themselves elect the 12 colleagues who make up the Judicial Council, which has a total of 20 members.

The EU Commission also recommends a similar reform.

However, critics object that the main judges' associations are dominated by conservative forces.

The government wants to keep the old procedure in the upcoming elections, but since Lesme's resignation it has not ruled out a later reform.

So far, the House of Representatives and the Senate have had to approve the candidates for the Judiciary Council and its chairmanship with a three-fifths majority.

The PP is demanding that the left-wing government "depoliticize" the judiciary.

Above all, she wants to prevent the left-wing Podemos party, with which Sánchez is in a coalition, from having a say in personal details.

However, as long as the conservatives governed themselves, they did little to make the judiciary independent of politics.

Carlos Lesmes owes his career to the PP.

During the tenure of PP Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, he rose in the Ministry of Justice.

As a senior official, he negotiated the replacement of the Judicial Council, of which he later became President.

The panel then appointed him a Supreme Court Justice, of which he has been Chair since 2013.

He also assumed leadership of the Judicial Council.

Although Pedro Sánchez came to power in the same year,