The government is treading on thin ice right now. The most disturbing sign is the resignation of the key senator to join the most important commission of Congress.
Thursday afternoon Juan Carlos Romero of Salta announced his departure from the Legislative Procedure Commission, the one who approves or does not approve the DNU signed by the presidents. Decisive in the case of a government that has a reverential option on decrees. Romero is the magician who built the agreement of the blocks friendly to the government, to obtain the 39 votes that allowed him last December to remove Christian Peronism from the administration of the Chamber.
This agreement entered into emergency due to the internal dissidence that manifested itself in the vote that rejected DNU 70. In the past week, several commissions were unable to meet due to the resistance of senators from provinces such as Santa Cruz and Río Negro, including the others. , to give the number to the projects to be processed.
They have stood with their governors who are demanding that the government’s mistreatment of those districts end.. The concern is mitigated by the fact that the government is a stylist of the changes taking place. He does and undoes what he has done in a few hours. In the same way he invents his dramas and his adversaries.
The problems he faces are not as big as he says: he amplifies them, if not actually aggravates the existing ones: poverty, unemployment, recession. Not even his opponents are that keen. He sails alongside the former Cambiemos, does not irritate the Peronism that is gone and believes that he will save himself by managing the “castometer”. He runs the risk of believing, like other governments, that governing means running advertising campaigns.
DNU in trouble
This fragmentation of the pro-government front puts the fate of the mini version of the omnibus law in the Senate at risk if it is approved by the Deputies. It also endangers the favorable treatment of the DNU signed by Javier Milei with a controversial pension mobility formula.
Romero will not speak because he is aware that he must preserve that group of great dissidents that the opposition can take advantage of. If I spoke I would explain it he had grown tired of government officials not providing explanations to Congress and that the ruling party did not ingeniously oppose the blocking of Christianity in the House.
This also he got tired of the cold with which the senators of La Libertad Avanza take the initiatives of their government. This coldness prevented the DNU Commission from meeting to review the decrees awaiting approval by Mauricio Macri and Alberto Fernández, according to an agenda that he made an effort to put together. I would say that he prefers to focus on other commissions of which he is a member and which have more feasible projects, such as the one he presented for the labor reform.
If he spoke, he would also remove Victoria Villarruel from her complaints. Cue more Olivos. To the point that he insisted on resignation despite the fact that some officials of the ruling party were preparing a meeting of this interbloc with the government leadership, which would take place in the beginning week.
The Audit and the Court have set the course
The government delays obvious formalities, such as making public the final letter of the projects for which it seeks immediate approval from Congress. The affront it produces in the party community increases the price of support.
The governors pictured Thursday and the lonely, waiting lawmakers are going their own way that the government should take advantage of before they start causing damage below the water line.
The secrecy with which he negotiates the positions at the Supreme Court of Justice, the Attorney General’s Office and the General Court of Auditors of the Nation casts lights and shadows on what the government’s medium and long-term project is. If he applied the same tactics with which he governs to these issues, Milei would be on the verge of using these negotiations to divide his partners from the PRO and UCR, and these blocs from each other.
If you want to build your own party with national reach, it is better for them to be divided and fighting each other. Milei doesn’t seem like a power creator. She uses the power of others to resolve her original weakness, just as she does not want a government – and delays its integration – she wants the parties in a pharmacological coma, as she does with her own government.
It is understood: if there are many designated and responsible officials – as the neoparla says -, each with their own initiative, the administration builds muscles and generates powers which then must be administered, and can weaken those in charge. Better than nothing growing much. And if something grows, bonsai. The proof is the fate of labor sector officials. They get fired before they get appointed.
Scenarios
• Some wonder How long will Milei wait to make an agreement with Peronism? which maintains around a hundred deputies and 33 senators, and which flattered itself by bringing important figures from the Fernandista administration into the government, such as Guillermo Francos and Daniel Scioli.
• Others also wonder whether or not he is willing to fight with Mauricio Macri. The test of love is whether he will negotiate one of the three positions in the AGN for the PRO. Macri needs like hell to have an extremely reliable auditor this cycle, when some decisions of his presidency will be reviewed.
• It must resolve itself If you are willing to be closer or further away from radicalism, which also aspires to have a representative in said supervisory body. The government has become dependent on radicalism in the Senate until further notice, and since Peronism rebelled and refused to guarantee a quorum in committees.
Wait for the ruling party to collect the number, otherwise it won’t enter. Without commissions there are no opinions and without opinions there is no space for projects. The proof is clear: if Diana Mondino did not make a pilgrimage with apologies to Martín Lousteau’s office, there would be no opinion on the ambassador’s candidacy to Israel. This dependence justifies the private meeting on Wednesday of Guillermo Francos with the head of the radical bloc in the Senate, Eduardo Vischi. This legislator expresses the positions of the governor of Corrientes.
• The Executive increases the price of these memberships by throwing a name into the ring for La Libertad Avanza, and thus puts an end to the scams. Peronism, the majority in Deputies, claims two of the three positions. It is the force that most needs its own auditors because this mandate will evaluate Alberto Fernández’s expenses. If there were two, Peronism would have the presidency of the AGN and the majority in the College of Auditors.
Fantasies: inventing a party with power
Another fantasy flows from Olivos and its suburbs with the government’s announcement to deploy its main political geniuses, the statesman Karina and the other Eduardo Menem, i.e. Lule, to build a national party under the brand La Libertad Avanza. The goal is fulfill Javier Milei’s prophecy that his government will win the elections next year and it will build a parliamentary majority that it does not have today.
He does not explain why this would happen, if he did not win even in 2023. Milei is president because Peronism and Cambiemos lost and the institutional domination of the ballot was triggered. He therefore manages what he can with the agenda and cast of the Macrist wing of Together for Change. Illusion makes a very personal reading of the story.
The construction of parliamentary majorities is done on the basis of the popular vote of the provinces, not with drag mechanisms from an illuminated dome, however celestial one may believe. Politics is a matter of representation.
The trap of intransigence
It is worth keeping an eye on this commitment because it explains the harshness of the national government’s relationships with governors. The Milei government is reluctant to share what little power it has with the leaders of the territories, where the population lives.
It has chosen an ineffective method to prosper, when it could gain followers for an agenda shared by much of Argentina’s moderate electorate and its legislative representation.
Why do not you do that? Probably because he doesn’t have the skills to do it: he is in a learning period, he is doing the CBC of politics. He values the struggle for power more than a consensus agenda. He lets himself be carried away by that poison of Creole political life which is intransigence. It involves believing that negotiating is a sign of weakness.
One of the lessons left by the 2023 elections is that public opinion made Peronism and Cambiemos lose because their leaders fought fiercely for power, believing their future was assured. The leaders of the two forces, pierced by a destructive internalism, recognized this, late in the day.
The government was unable to ask for a vote on its plans. The governors of the moderate fringe have lost their voice, replying that they want to vote on everything, but that the details are missing. The detail isn’t just the silver. Neither ideology nor interests separate them. The detail is that Olivos tolerates them also having political projectswho recognize territorial power.
One way to intercept these projects is for Olivos to support the initiatives of La Libertad Avanza in his provinces. They ask for their vote at the National Congress and complain because they want to occupy their backyard for the 2025 elections.
Neomenemism and neofrepasism
Peronism and radicalism had already experienced this phenomenon in the 1990s, when FrePaSo leaders emerged in their provinces, winning over voters for a third space fueled by dissidents from the two traditional forces.
Today the projects of the little princess and Lule – who spent the 40 dark years of democracy (according to Milei and his acolytes) as an employee of the Senate – are nourished by the conservative and centre-right sectors that at the time fed the UCeDé. and subsequently to the PRO. Today they are tempted by the call to a neomenemism in substance and form. In the sand table of the point guards of this fantasy game there is logistics, even fantasy.
They are the delegations of the national departments of each province, which Olivos distributes among those who are faithful to the project of the national party. They are the spoils of every government and fuel another fantasy: that of being a delegate of ANSES, PAMI, Renaper, Migrations, etc. In a region, it is a path to success.
Not even the control of the national ANSES and the Mar del Plata delegation helped Fernanda Raverta win the elections in her city: she headed the delegation between 2010 and 2020 and her partner inherited that dignity when he took over the ANSES national.
Source: Clarin
