Judicial councils have been a common mechanism to protect judiciaries from political interference and grant their independence, especially after transitions from authoritarian to democratic regimes. However, sometimes the design of such councils allows political elites to participate in the appointment of top positions of the judiciary, which gives them incentives to appoint politically loyal judges. This structure might result in a trade-off by which, on one hand, lower career judges enjoy job security, independence, and prospects of promotion up to a midle court level, while on the other hand promotion to upper courts requires political exposure and promotes docility toward political elites. While this mechanism is well studied in systems where lower-court judges are already elected or where the political profile of judges is publicly acknowledged, in civil-law systems judicial councils make efforts to portrait judicial appointments as based on merits. Using a unique dataset on historical appointments to Spain's Supreme Court, this paper presents and empirically tests a model of this structure of incentives to analyze the politics of interference of the judiciary under a civil-law democracy.