The Court’s reinstatement of elected advisers from congressional blocs challenges the ruling party’s attempts to curtail the power of lawmakers.
Cristina’s decision to deny Luis Juez legitimacy and Cecilia Moreau’s decision to deprive elected representatives of the deputy blocs complement other measures to deny power to legislators. Cristina de Kirchner inaugurated in 2019 the routine of defining all sessions of the Senate as “extraordinary”. That is, without a prior agreement between the blocs on the topics to be discussed in the parliamentary work meetings.
Why did Cristina cancel the pre-agreement process? Because she was a forum of decisions he could not control.
The topics that he sent to the Campus in session feed a long list of initiatives that died in the Deputies and never became law: judicial reforms, the modification of the Supreme Court, the new regime of the Attorney General’s Office, the elimination of the need for the 2/3 for designate the chief prosecutor, the anti-money laundering fund to be paid to the IMF, the social security moratorium, the reform of the Judiciary Council with 17 members and no presidency of the Court. If Cristina’s work in the Senate were to be valued for productivity, she would have to return part of the salary.
Cristina stole the Senate from the senators
It is understandable that, if Cristina did not have the power to advance the consensus, she did not allow for discussions in parliamentary work. Thus she broke the old opinion of Miguel Pichetto: the Senate belongs to the Senators.
With the presidency of Cristina the Senate ceased to belong to the senators. They had never lost control of the chamber under other Senate presidencies: Víctor Martínez, Eduardo Menem, Chacho Álvarez, Daniel Scioli, Amado Boudou or Gabriela Michetti.
Only Cristina has closed that platform which is Parliamentary Work and has effectively made decisions as if she were a senator, when her role as vice president does not give her any representation. If you intervene as a filter of the issues that enter the agenda of each session, you act as a legislator. And she is not.
It is Cristina’s way of acquiring some plot authority that fell to her in the 2019 cast. It is a mistake to believe that she does this because she has a temperamental and reactive personality. It is a ploy to exercise what little power he has.
The symbol is the sunset of the solemn Blue Room of the House as the venue for hearings on major issues of consensus, such as the Budget or the laws on structural ambition. Arbitrariness is a way to show authority, but if the end result is projects dying on the banks of the lower house, the result is very poor. And it translates into a legalization of politics that Peronism cannot now complain about.
Weakness leads to the jurisdictionalization of politics
The original weakness led Cristina to also promote the deployment of blocks to capture representatives of the majority and the second minority.
He has slipped politics into a judicial plot with the sole purpose of proving that he has the power to make arbitrary decisions. Consent is giving up power, but those who are weak have nothing to give up. If it is true that Cecilia Moreau’s resolution, which banned the Tribunal on Thursday, was supposed to reproduce Cristina’s arbitrariness in the Senate in the deputies, it is another sign of the weakness that ends up judging politics.
The ruling party cannot complain now that the Court is entering politics. It does this to repair the weakness of leaders who are left with only recourse to arbitrariness.
Cristina’s resignation is a consequence, not a cause
Cristina de Kirchner’s resignation from the candidacy is not the cause of anything but the effect of everything. She does not trigger new facts – as the Christian-dependent planet claims – but is rather an expected consequence of the vice president’s degree of discredit, which prevents her from embellishing any slate of candidates.
This loss of prestige drove Peronism to defeat in 2021 and could face another setback in 2023. Resigning is a realistic decision in which the vice president tries to avoid becoming, once again, a divisive factor in Peronism, deprive the ruling party of competitiveness in next year’s presidential elections.
with the resignation deactivate the anti-Christian tribes that they might be tempted to use it as a justification for some schism. The resignations are the end of a process that began on November 14, 2021, the day of the legislative elections that Peronism lost. The electorate sanctioned the ruling party in that midterm elections and led to the defeat of 13 Peronist-ruled provinces.
In some of them, such as La Pampa, Peronism had never lost since 1983. Any analysis of the reasons for that defeat indicates a public sanction for: 1) the management of the economy; 2) the management of the Covid plague.
This management was in the hands of the national government, articulated since 2019 in figures of AMBA Peronism – Alberto Fernández, Cristina, Sergio Massa. The three today lead the ranking of discredit in the polls.
The vice president and her acolytes have preferred to explain the resignation – a long-standing word in Argentine history – as a response from Cristina to the proscription that the sentence in the Highway case entails. For the interests of the ruling party, this pretext is more effective than admitting it, even without that rulingneither Cristina, Massa nor Alberto have the minimum level of prestige to lead a presidential list in 2023.
That’s why this justification avoids saying that even the sentence is not firm and that years will pass in which it will be reduced in successive appeals, until it becomes a mild bump on the head. Lighter than Julio de Vido’s acquittal. They try to turn a decision made out of necessity into a virtue.
United Peronism, but without strategy
Peronism is a league of governors joined by trade unionists and mayors of large neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. Until now, the main asset to be competitive has been kept intact: unity.
He lost it in 2009 and suffered a decade of losses. It recovered it in 2019 and does not seem threatened by any schism, despite not having a leader or a program, and a fragility in the control of the territories. This makes united Peronism a force that finds it very difficult to win an election.
The lack of a leadership and agenda, and the collapse of its key national leaders, detracts from that competitiveness.
Those in charge of the project (which some governors and some trade unionists are discussing today) believe that by the end of the year they must have agreed on three points that will allow them to face the defeat effect that polls on voting intentions show: 1) an agreement to choose a formula that does not lead them to defeat, as would happen with Alberto, Massa or Cristina; 2) a minimal program that reconciles the differences between the orthodoxy of Massa’s economic team – which is based on the theology of the market – and the intransigence of Christianity, which bases its occurrences on a long and sterile lament on the greed of capitalism .
The minister’s orthodoxy is seen by Christians as a mild continuation of the agenda of the Macri presidency, articulated around a pestilential agreement with the IMF. Christianity believes that such a program leads to defeat and encourages a change of course towards a more closed and self-sufficient economy – life as a one-way street. The third point is a national strategy which implies that what is good for the Peronism of the AMBA is good for the Peronism of the interior. Herein lies the basic contradiction (Cooke would say) or the fundamental contradiction (Ricardo Lafferriere would say) that every organization must reach.
Cristina is worth what Peronism is worth
In the last debate held at the CFI (Federal Investment Council) the harshness of the analysis led to exasperation. There was agreement that, to achieve a broad consensus in the PJ, the three leaders of the presidential trifecta must allow debate, but all three relinquish any precedence. Cristina has already gone down, Alberto doesn’t know how to climb anything; Massa shakes the rattle that if inflation goes down he will run as a candidate. “- To what? To lose?”, they wondered in CFI.
In that debate, offensive phrases were heard such as: “- We need the vote of Córdoba, do you think we will achieve it by including Máximo or Cuervo Larroque on the lists?” On Schiaretti: “-Let’s forget the Gringo, he’s a friend more than anything else of Macri and already has the succession assured in Llaryora. We need someone who is voted in Córdoba and also in the suburbs”. Christine? “-30% is not from him, it’s from Peronism. But every time he calls a trade unionist, he takes him to Yasky,” complained a union boss.
Politics is squaring the circle and Peronism’s job is to ensure that its competitive advantage of unity is embodied in a candidate, a program and a strategy that it does not have and that it will cost it to build. They leave from a life dedicated to fighting each other.
“Let’s do something, or give the key to Cambiemos”
The opposition faces the same challenge. It has an unbeatable resource which is the favor of the electoral consensus of the medium sectors of the large districts, where it wins votes and percentage positions of election in election. In 2019 the Macri-Pichetto formula won in five of Argentina’s seven largest districts, and in 2021 it surpassed Peronism by eight points.
The standard exercise indicates that Together for Change won 42.75% of the vote in 2021, which when added to 8.20% of right-wing liberals, that end of the quadrant, puts him at 50.95%. If federal Peronism maintains 5.65%, it will bring this possibility to 56.6%. On the other hand, assuming that the Frente de Todos repeated 34.56% and added 5.41% of the left, the government would reach a modest 39.97%. One of the conveners of the CFI put it crudely: “- Let’s do something, or let’s go immediately to deliver the key to the government to Cambiemos. We already know what they are, that they are against national industry, etc. “
The governors secure their chair
Of the governors who are eligible to take on nominations, there are three who have already secured themselves for the future. Sergio Uñac of San Juan, owner of this week’s event in the CABA; Juan Manzur and Jorge Capitanich.
The three uncoupled the gubernatorial elections from the national ones and canceled the provincial PASO. This allows them to offer the recipe: “- I’m a candidate in my province, and after winning, I’m here to hire what you want.”
Capitanich wants to speed things up, and since 2019 he has been asking the PJ to restructure the management. He is confident that this Tuesday, in Santiago del Estero, a meeting with Gerardo Zamora and Omar Perotti will speed things up.
They will meet to discuss plans for the Bajos Submeridionales, but pre-election strategy will dominate the meeting. Today he is asking for a federal table to act as a political action commission, which establishes the method of candidacies, negotiates a minimum program and decides on a strategy. The group of governors is looking for a date to meet before the end of the year. They thought of taking advantage of the act that was to be held this Monday for a complaint from Cristina to the PAMI of the former presidents.
Source: Clarin
