For Milei, governing It is the continuation of the campaign with other means. This is the music that the decree signed on Wednesday sings.
The texts do not count so much, since they end in a programmatic act and not in an executive act. This is a list of initiatives that seek the benefits of struggle to achieve governance more than the sanction of reforms. It’s a bodybuilding exercise that allows you to stay center stage.
It was Christianity’s own purpose when it advanced the case to the Supreme Court knowing it would never have the votes to pass it. But I wanted the fight to identify friends and enemies, lukewarm and negotiators, and estimate the price of each protagonist.
The DNU is a missile that aims to polarize itself starting from this weakness, following the dependence of Argentine politics on the regenerationism which leads to processes of institutional change that its protagonists justify as a new beginning, a clean slate, the advent of a new time. It is evoked by the title of the military trials: Argentine Revolution (Onganía), National Reorganization (Videla), etc.
A shortcut
Polarization is populism’s shortcut to divide. “The devil wants to sow the weeds of division. Let us not give in to their flattery, let us not give in to the temptation of polarization”, said Pope Francis, which everyone listens to and needs today.
Polarization with the announcement of a regeneration program offers all actors the opportunity to reconfigure their roles. It is an invitation to opponents to come closer and to themselves to decide if they are worthy of fighting. AND a cast of costumes that can improve the subtle depth of the Milei administration e an offer of amnesty to the caste.
Amateur mistakes
Since the DNU is only a programmatic act, complaints of unconstitutionality are unlikely to thrive for now. If it were an executive act that contained the text of the laws, it could have an immediate brake on protections and precautionary measures that few have the legitimacy to take.
It’s a shot in the dark that ignores the key to political action, which is that the construction of majorities around projects.
If there was a strategy to achieve the standards, the government would have to separate initiatives that need to be laws from those that can only progress with a DNU. It would reduce his vulnerability. Now he doesn’t have to look for votes, he has to find the opposition do not turn the DNU.
It included colored mirrors for barter such as the repeal of the borderland law, to provoke the Patagonian activists of Lake Escondido. An ideological signal, interchangeable with Peronism’s support for some more effective decision.
It also suffers – it is an adolescent government – from the prejudices of the fans, such as the mistake of believing that Argentina is an absurd, failed, labyrinthine and incomprehensible country, whose problems can be solved with common sense.
Macri believed this about inflation, which he promised to remedy in one fell swoop. He ignores that look behind every institution there is a rationality and an interest. In any reform, this rationality and interest must be addressed.
Second chance for Cambiamos
Milei seeks to thrive in fertile soil. Deregulation is something positive for the bourgeoisie who supported his election. It is a hotbed of lawsuits, but Justice will not act while the laws articulating the DNU are in the legislative phase.
Cambiamos has already failed. In January 2018, a few days after the October 2017 legislative victory, Mauricio Macri’s government signed a DNU which is a draft of what Milei has now signed.
The DNU/27 of 10 January of that year was called “Debureaucratization and simplification” and even advanced the decimal metric system (art. 61°) and got stuck in Congressdespite Cambiemos having a large interbloc that approved more than 190 Macri laws, according to the calculations of Mario Negri, who headed that interbloc.
We returned with that DNU and its abolition was negotiated with the Peronist opposition thanks to three bills approved in June.
That same month Federico Sturzenegger has resigned baquiano of this DNU mileist.
A fight so that they don’t reject it
This is the second opportunity Cambiemos has to perfect that impulse, recycled by Sturzenegger for the failed candidacy of Patricia Bullrich.
The difference with the precedent of 2018 is that Javier Milei’s weakness as president is replicated in Congress.
Never before has Congress it has rejected only one DNU of the over one thousand signed in these 40 yearsbefore and after the 1994 reform and the 2006 regulations, which transformed them into a way of governing by ignoring Congress.
The DNU governs if one of the Houses approves them or if Congress remains silent and puts them in a box. But never has government been so small in Congress. How will La Libertad Avanza decide in the DNU Commission made up of only 39 deputies and 7 senators? Also, how will you ensure it doesn’t get rejected?
Praetorian like Christina
This concern led Guillermo Francos, one of the normal in this very anomalous government, to sit last Thursday in Martín Menem’s office to talk with the representatives of the “legislative agreement” of the “32 federals”, which could become the hinge of every decision of the new Congress.
Francos had to listen to the complaint from the table, where Miguel Pichetto, one of the most experts of this legislature, was located, for the mistreatment of Congress by this president. He identified his praetorian vocation with that of Cristina de Kirchner, who had the budget approved in October of each year with decreasing figures, and then, months later, increased expenses by taking advantage of creative accounting.
Is greater arbitrariness imaginable?, was asked at the table where Nicolás Massot, Emilio Monzó and Margarita Stolbizer were also present.
“You have to understand Javier”
This group of deputies reproached Francos that the DNU was inadequate when Congress is closest to helping the Executive.
Also that he turned to that viscous instrument like the DNU to ask for measures that require institutional firmness. Who will invest in a privatization done by decree? No one who is willing to pay for what he buys is worth it.
“If they sent a law, They got 90% of what they want. “What happened to them?”, they asked themselves. Francos had no response. asked consideration towards the president’s personality “because he promised it”. He asked for exceptional treatment towards Milei’s temperament. Man is like that.
“A very wise thing, to pretend to be crazy”
One of the tweezers of the Milei maneuver is simulate such arbitrariness for which Minister Francos requests consideration.
It is another resource of the weak and even of terrorists. If the president refuses the mere presence of an innocent plate of french fries at his table—as the story goes Pablo de Leon in Clarín on Thursday -, what wouldn’t you do in case of extreme necessity, like having a chorizo or, worse, a black pudding looked fiercely in your eyes?
It’s the application of the old crazy boss method as a way to gain authority when you don’t have it. He recommended her Machiavelli centuries ago: “It is a very wise thing to pretend to be crazy for a time” (Decades of Livy, Book III, chapter 2).
But be careful, Machiavelli’s writings, read for centuries as the recipe book for cynicism, have been reinterpreted as a shortcut to make the prince fail. A revenge from the dark Florentine cauldron (hypothesis formulated by Erica Brenner in Be like the fox: Machiavelli’s Lifelong Quest for Freedom, Norton, 2017).
70% don’t like the DNU
Milei should read polls like the one done by Poliarquía on the DNU, which reveals this They have a 70% rejection rate among those consulted (“Investigation of constitutional culture”, presented by Eduardo Fidanza, Antonio María Hernández and Daniel Zovatto).
Milei won with the sum of 29% of the votes in the first round and those provided by the Together for Change electorate. A change was voted on, but a change of government, not a change of countryas Milei imagines in the prolegomena to his decree.
There he sets out the terms of a culture war against collectivism and in repudiation of the last 100 years of history.
That history is what allowed him to be president thanks to an institutional domination so solid that it supports even the weakness of a president. without their own votes, without a party, without legislators, without governors and without their own teamwho is recruited among friends, family, employers and employees.
The result of the 108 years of validity of the radical-conservative agreement that was the Sáenz Peña law is that Argentina has the most robust system in the region and one of the most solid in Western Europe. It ensures the alternation of governments of different types and even the extravagance of a Milei. That’s not something that can be said about many countries.
Source: Clarin
