Miguel Pichetto showed Santi Caputo the gates of hell: “The Macri government began to fall when it bungled raises for pensioners. it was the beginning of the end”.
The “shadow giant” that is this Caputo – representative of a family ethnicity that has more ramifications in the caste than the Cafieros – listened carefully. Milei had left him in Buenos Aires to lead the capitulation on Thursday evening.
How the one sent from heaven comes out of that staff, he understood clearly. He finds it difficult to reach his interlocutors, sober people who do not agree with his enthusiasm – rolled up to show his tattooed arms, smoking a cigar in the corner as he speaks, despite the restrictions in public offices -. Imagine him in front of Pichetto, the man dressed in dark who neither laughs nor cries.
That memory was enough for the government envoys to admit to lowering the pension chapter and to look for some update formula this weekend. CPI since February? “- No – replied Pichetto – since December. They have already lost a lot. Every time a government – he explained – jokes with pensioners, it brings discredit and discredit on everything, and that bill is paid here in Congress”.
The threat of two critical opinions
That day ended in the shadow of two major threats: the two drafts of two minority reports for the handling of the omnibus bill that were completed that day. One was that of Peronism, which moved directly to reject the project..
The simplicity of the device is compensated by the long arguments that Germán Martínez’s block unfolds in the foundations. They say they have 107 votes from Union por la Patria plus the left.
The other project, also ready Thursday afternoon, was the secret opinion prepared by the group of tamed opposition blocs. The deputies of Pichetto’s “Los 23” bloc prepared it together with the deputies of radicalism, PRO, Federal Innovation and others.
They pride themselves on having between 70 and 94 votes, according to the elastic support of the deputies of Mileista Macrismo. They prepared this minority opinion in case the ruling party pulled back the tablecloth and refused any changes to the original plan.
During the week they had attended discreet meetings with government officials who listened to their reprimands but did not assume that they had the authority to negotiate.
“We prepared it to prevent them from mistreating us,” says one of the editors. If this happened, the quorum and the votes in favor of the milleist project, which provides for a minority of minorities in Congress, would be in danger.
The more left-wing Peronism view might have 107 votes to impose the treatment in the first place. The secret opinion of the negotiating opposition was the resource to bring the ruling party to the table and force it to negotiate. A legislative defeat would seal the government’s fate for the rest of the year.
The screaming will continue
Long talks took place with the Secretary of Energy, Eduardo Rodríguez Chirillo, the Secretary of Finance Pablo Quirno, the deputy chief of staff José Rolandi, who was given the role of “executive secretary” of the Nicolás Posse management, a group of lawyers of the Presidency whose names have hardly been recorded.
They listened to the comments of the deputies representing “The Normals”. They took note of it, didn’t say a word, and promised to return before Milei returned from Davos.
Guillermo Francos and Caputo appeared at the Congress on Thursday, at dusk. They have presented 100 responses to objections to the project to the various blocs that make up “The Normals”, which will be digested in the opinion that the ruling party will bring to its headquarters next week.
Milei will raise his voice again, as when he warned Victoria Villarruel that Sunday that there would be no Tuesday cabinet meeting during his absence. The vice president, who always has something else to do, has retired and missed the barbecue. It was written, will they make you pay for the menu?
“The only one who negotiates is me”
That Peronism examines how Milei makes mistakes in rookie tactics. The first attacks the only ones who could help him in something, that is, the sectors identified with moderate votes that elected him president. He fights with “The Normals”.
He is certainly more interested in remaining faithful to the discourse of intransigence and regeneration. He leaks information that reinforces intransigence. He doesn’t deny it at the Olivos barbecue last Sunday Guillermo Francos and Martín Menem asked him, before the other ministers, for permission to negotiate the best opinion with “The Normals” of Congress.
Milei would have reacted with an outburst of anger, getting angry and denying any possibility of an agreement. Or he recognizes that the advantage of this struggle lies in the struggle itself. Or he is building the negotiating table with himself. The message would be: the only one negotiating here is me.
Raúl Alfonsín, in the legendary radical summit of Ranelagh, a few hours before the meeting with Carlos Menem to agree on the reform, accused the participants of being lukewarm and soft for having accepted a negotiation with the government of the time.
Nobody saw her when she said, at the end of the speech: fine, but what if they accepted a reform that she had, etc. etc. etc. – and describes his constitutional reform project – things would be different. He was there to negotiate, and no one else.
Even Néstor Kirchner, at the peak of his government, one of the weakest in history (22% of the votes), proposed to confront the sectors that did not support him. One was Peronism itself, from which he took Duhaldist officials for his cabinets.
Towards the military, the Executive has reopened hostilities to review the past. With entrepreneurs he even said: “I want to have the same relationship with them that Menem had” (Personal speech, London, 2003). This was their policy, which bore fruit during Cristina’s mandates, supported by the applause of businessmen of all colors at White Hall events.
These wallpapers explain it Milei’s taste for taking to the field with the little power he has to negotiate follows this line. Macri did so as soon as he took office, appointing two Supreme Court judges by decree, protected by the exceptional circumstance of the congressional recess. He forced everyone to sit down, receive those designations and be treated with respect. Milei is looking for the same.
With little service you gain oxygen
Caputo’s appearance with Francos with a negotiating mandate, which the government had denied him until that day, removed this tweezers maneuver. It is not clear how the conversation with friends of Congress will end, to add the 94 votes of “The Normals” to the 38 of La Libertad Avanza.
With 132 there would be a quorum and votes for a majority opinion of the ruling party to be discussed. This capitulation damages the body of the government, that is, the style that prolongs the revolutionary and revisionist narrative of the electoral campaign over time.
It is a triumph for the legislators who held back the project, but it is also a triumph for the government and Cambiemos’ friends who provided the government program.
If half of what was agreed in those 100 points that the government admitted to negotiating comes out, it will have the necessary tools to start once and for all a management that delays the solution of the inherited problems and seems rather to prolong the time rather than to remedy them .
Those sent from heaven brought down everything that the deputies of the blocs they met with – PRO, UCR, “Los 23” – had asked for.
The fantasy of the cultural battle
Caputo saved the chapters on culture and environment. “They won’t go away, they will all be voted against,” they explained. “- We don’t care, for us it’s an ideological question.” It depends on your tastes. As a man addicted to tweeting, Caputo argued for fighting the cultural battle,” – Let our agenda be clear”.
Also to include the labor chapter of the DNU in the omnibus law. Don’t you think it would be inconvenient to hold a meeting on this topic with a strike? “- What is the problem? – was the answer – yes, we will win. He left in the air the idea that they prefer that the points raised by the opposition remain in the opinion and that, in any case, they vote against in the Chamber.
Legislators prefer there to be a refined opinion because they don’t want to be stuck with the negative vote of Peronism. The ruling House party does not talk to Peronism, nor to the La Libertad Avanza bloc, many of whose members complain that they are hired as their own and are not paid as allies.
They are waiting for the lists of places they deserve in the delegations of national organizations in the provinces. And no one answers.
Before having to study the topics
Anyone who sees in the government’s agenda an attempt to reform the economy that conflicts with politics is wrong. The impulse of the party in power is to advance from politics towards sectors that need to be aligned to guarantee governability of a certain density, which compensates for its original weakness.
This is why the apostle of the agreement with the dialogue blocks was Caputo, a communication expert to whom Milei attributes strategic influences. It was he who spoke the most on Thursday in front of the deputies, despite the silence of Francos and his cousins Menem, Martín and “Lule”.
It was an unequal table because they had in front of them Pichetto, López Murphy, Massot, Monzó, Juan López, Randazzo, representatives of the densest block in the room. Government delegates defended a project they were unaware of.
This is demonstrated by Caputo’s slip when he stated that the fate of the Anses Sustainability Guarantee Fund could be resolved by the Bicameral Privatization Commission. It was the furthest thing from knowing the plans.
The government proposes that the FGS be transferred to the Treasury. The board responded that these are pension funds protected from embargoes on state assets due to international lawsuits.
Judge Thomas Griesa already dismissed them in the bondholders’ complaint, and now they could be exposed again to the decisions of Judge Loretta Preska, who is handling the YPF case.
Diego Bossio, former director of Anses and bearer of documents in Pichetto’s “Los 23” block, explained it with precision and experience.
Enemies gather before him
Added to this style capitulation are movements from political sectors that have strengthened their position vis-à-vis the party in power. The government feared the exposed fracture of radicalism.
Rodrigo de Loredo’s friendly bloc was unable to prevent a dozen deputies, led by Facundo Manes, from asking for an extension of the extraordinary elections, which announced a desire to delay the discussion. A slow-motion shock is a form of gradualism.
Ten oil provinces ratified in the ICC, now under the seal of the Federal Organization of Hydrocarbon Producing States (OFEPHI), the El Messidor document known the previous week. Contains the conditions set to modify the entire hydrocarbon chapter of the project.
Following that meeting, the block of senators managed by Juan Carlos Romero of Salta was consolidated, which already has seven deputies and constitutes the third block of the Senate.
In two meetings with deputies of their respective parties, the non-Peronist governors reminded the government that if the income tax is not reinstated, some provinces may be affected, but this will especially damage the national government which is financed by this tax.
They laugh at the question. of the paper threat which the government uses when it says it wants to exchange profits for votes in Congress.
Source: Clarin
