Santiago Fioriti
05/15/2021 11:01 PM
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 05/15/2021 11:50 PM
Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, María Eugenia Vidal, Diego Santilli, Maximiliano Ferraro and Maricel Etchecoin were sitting in the living room of Elisa Carrió's house. It is an environment they know. Every so often they travel the 81 kilometers that separate the City of Exaltation from the Cross to see the leader of the Civic Coalition and discuss politics, although most of the time the meetings do not transcend. The house is Carrió's refuge and bunker. There her world opens: the two libraries, the paintings, the family photos, the piano, an old stereo, the handicrafts bought at neighborhood fairs, the vases, a portrait of Frida Kahlo, cartoons by Hermenegildo Sábat, a decorated kitchen. with handwritten phrases and its curious room, which rarely lets you see, because there is an altar to pray there,as exotic as their hats and their colorful dresses, which also decorate the room.
"Did you see how good my skin is? The confinement helped me ”
, Carrió appeared in front of his guests on Thursday at noon.
Rodríguez Larreta had arrived with his own food so as not to deviate from the diet and with a tray of macaroni for coffee.
They loaded it.
The mayor laughed and Lilita told him: “You are better at conferences, Horacio, and your beard looks good.
You no longer give such a log, now you look like a reed ”.
Vidal was laughing too.
"Lilita, you have to see the series about Isabel La Católica, she's in Flow," he told her.
“I don't know what that Flow is.
I watch YouTube.
I was looking at Chinese philosophy, ”Carrió replied.
They talked for a while about series and films, Ingmar Bergman and Italian neorealism.
Most had swabbed before going.
Carrió is very afraid of contracting coronavirus.
He does not leave his house.
They went to an open-air gallery to have lunch and get into the background themes. A few meters away, from the ceiling of a second gallery hung
a cage with three ducklings placed in a row on a branch
, which Carrió put up to recall a famous phrase with which Aníbal Fernández questioned his sanity. They served cheeses, caprese empanadas, and trout with puree. The talk got serious when they entered the political and electoral plane.
"We are all going to have to put the body in,"
said Vidal, who remains unsolved if she will be a candidate and if, if she is, she will play in the City or in the Province.
"You have to put everything on the court,
" said Rodríguez Larreta, almost as if imploring that Vidal understand what he was trying to say. The electoral satellites of the opposition follow the movements of the former governor. Some with patience and resignation, others with anger at their indecision. For better or for worse it is the one that the district will order.
She says she is not anxious. That the anxiety they transmit is from politics, not from people. He says it and believes it, but above all he has it verified: the focus groups of his team reveal that society presents, of course, other constraints. Some citizens do
not even know that they will have to vote in four months
. Faced with specific questions, they ask her to run as a candidate for governor or for the presidency, ignoring that these are legislative elections.
The great absentee at the summit in Exaltación was Mauricio Macri. Absent but not so much. There were allusions to him. They weren't entirely good. Several of those present would like to see it more peaceful.
"Rather in the position of a former president,"
said one of the leaders who was in Exaltation. That reflects a part of the opposition's thinking. There's others. Leaders more rebellious or prone to questioning the role of the head of government maintain that larretismo hurts that Macri has marked the field
"with a book and three tweets."
Macri's game around Vidal is very transparent. He wants it on the ballot and, more precisely, in Buenos Aires. He's been texting her at that address for a year. These messages, in recent times, have been transformed into pressure. Macri talks frankly with his interlocutors. Those interlocutors then transmit their thoughts to Vidal in a more washed way. Often happens. Larreta himself could attest to the actions of Macri, who the former president also holds responsible for the threats of his ally and
blames him for his lack of determination to convince her.
Macri and Vidal try to rebuild a bond that is not what it was. Last year it passed with a constant malaise between them.
Today they do not radiate happiness, but they are better
. On April 25, they had lunch at the Quinta Los Abrojos. It was the last time they saw each other. At that date were Macri's children, Juliana Awada and Enrique Sacco, Vidal's partner. It was a social gathering. The most intimate meeting, politics, happened just over a month ago. Hand to hand.
The two promised that the content of that conversation would not be leaked. Something, of course, always leaks.
"Decide on your own,"
asked the former president. The word "alone" may not have been naive. Macri believes that Vidal is under great pressure. Is it because of Larreta, as Macri believes, that he prefers that he compete in the City to outshine Patricia Bullrich? Or is it, as a man from the kidney of larretismo says, that the mayor wants to see her in the Province to set foot towards 2023? Larreta, at this point, would sign that at least compete, beyond the district. She believes that not playing will expose her to society. That will pay costs. She swears she doesn't know what to do.
In Bullrich's environment they question her. To her and also to Larreta. They wonder: Doesn't it seem like time to have a reference in the largest electoral province in the country? Bullrich and Vidal saw each other a month ago.
They had a long coffee in front of the Botanical Garden
. It was a good talk, but there was no progress because Vidal insisted from the start that his doubts persist. Bullrich told him that it is not possible to continue delaying definitions because the stakes are high.
Bullrich's candidacy for deputy for the City would seem immovable. With the support of Macri - with whom he met in his offices the same day that Carrió opened the doors of his house - she wants to top the list and believes that she has earned that right. For Larreta it is not resolved. For Martín Lousteau, another key actor, neither. Both maintain that his profile
excludes the possibility of adding new sectors
and that he only represents the hard wing of the voters. One of the Larretista ministers says that
the fault of the mess
lies
with Macri
. That he made Bullrich believe that there is no better option.
The former minister presents credentials and defends her ideas every time she is called from a TV channel. In their environment they become emboldened. They have become acidic:
“Do you remember when Patricia said last year that schools had to be opened and Horacio met with Alberto and accompanied him?
”. Much can be said about Bullrich, unless he is not willing to play hard.
The history marks that Macri endorses the competition in the PASO. Except when radicalism threatened to confront him in 2019, he always considered the primaries as a good mechanism for when agreements are not reached. Even when he tried to prevent them, as in that confrontation between Larreta and Gabriela Michetti, in 2015, he ended up giving way. That time he supported Rodríguez Larreta. Today things are different. I would prefer Bullrich to a candidate who comes with the mayor's nod. What if it ended up being Vidal, of whom he boasts of having propelled her to the governorship?
Nice dilemma for Macri.
The negotiation is open. It will not be easy. An intern between Bullrich and Vidal could be very attractive.
At the same time, perhaps, too bloody.
It is not what Rodríguez Larreta wants, who tries to build his presidential career with an anti-crack speech. Their musings do not end there.
How would he be stopped if for some reason Vidal lost?
While Macri, Bullrich and other protagonists harden, Larreta, Vidal and Carrió insist that the levels of confrontation with the Government must be lowered.
They detect that society is fed up with fights.
These disputes of the ruling class coexist with the rise in contagion, with an inflation that emerges well above the projected (this week someone asked Miguel Pesce, the president of the Central Bank, for details, and his response was disconcerting) and with levels alarming insecurity in the suburbs.
Larreta and Carrió warned on Thursday about the ghost of "let everyone go", that cry that in 2001 marked Argentina with fire and that threatens to return in every deep crisis.
Look also
María Eugenia Vidal, in campaign code, demanded Alberto F. to summon the opposition to define a plan
Alberto and Guzmán went to the river
