'Animate, Facundo': Morales turns on the UCR alarm clock

06/28/2021 21:46

• Clarín.com

• Opinion

Updated 06/28/2021 9:46 PM

There were several at the head table Sunday night, but all fell silent when Gerardo Morales began to speak.

"Facundo, cheer up ... You have to play because we have to stop being the caboose of the PRO and

put a radical back in the Casa Rosada."

Silence was cut with a knife.

The governor of Jujuy was swollen with optimism because the numbers that were passing him from the entire province

anticipated a conclusive victory

in the legislative elections and because the great rival of recent years, the implacable activist of Kirchnerism 

Milagro Sala, failed again

as always that he had tried at the polls.

Facundo, the one who has to cheer up, is Manes,

the neurologist who draws crowds

across the country with his talks about the multiple capacities of the brain. A while before, he had spoken in front of an audience of two hundred young radicals at the Alto La Viña Hotel. The euphoria enveloped the atmosphere of the Jujuy militants who follow Morales, and they applauded that scientist who spoke to them about education, who perspires and disheveled as if he were an evangelical pastor. But going to compete in the province of Buenos Aires is something else.

The rough territory that has been bending governors

for a century and a half. And that the pulse of the lioness María Eugenia Vidal has also just beaten.

Therefore, Morales rushes him in the heat of the night of triumph. "Cheer up, Facundo," he repeats. And Manes says yes with his head and his eyes. Although he

still does not say yes.

In the other chairs of the Jujuy table, Martín Lousteau, José Cano from Tucumán, Máximo Abad from Buenos Aires and

two women

are also enthusiastic

, a breakthrough for the centennial party that finds it difficult to shake off a certain macho drag. Deputy Josefina Mendoza, another Buenos Aires born in Daireaux who

was trained in the Purple Strip

and came to preside over the Argentine University Federation. She was criticized by some of her co-religionists from the student body when she came to Congress on the same ballot as Esteban Bullrich, who was quietly crucified as a conservative.

Low flight envies

that time erased.

The other woman at the table was almost a message from radical history for a Manes who is still

pondering whether to exchange his untouchable aura

of science guru for the shaky prestige of politicians on the electoral campaign.

Especially in these times of social networks, in which any tweeter without a recognizable identity can send the worst insults to the digital home.

It was Rocío Alfonsín

, whose mother Ana María is the second daughter of Raúl Alfonsín, the man who gave back to the UCR the winning spirit that Peronism had taken from him since the 1960s.

The granddaughter Rocío is

very opposed, unlike her uncle Ricardo,

today ambassador in Madrid thanks to his closeness with Alberto Fernández. What would Raúl say if he woke up and discovered

the political diversity of his heirs.

Morales has become

a woodpecker

that hits on the doubts of those radicals who can help rebuild

the epic of bipartisanship

with Peronism. A

status quo

that Frepaso broke in the late 1990s; the ARI that Elisa Carrió founded and buried, and the PRO, which brought Mauricio Macri to the presidency with the coalition format that is Together for Change.

Vidal and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta prolonged that primacy over the UCR

in the City and in the Province, and the Buenos Aires head of government intends to extend hegemony by imposing his candidates in the elections of September and November.

"One of us has to be the candidate for president in 2023," Morales prompts Manes and Lousteau.

Alfredo Cornejo, the president of the UCR, is the fourth leader who has expressed his desire to compete for the Casa Rosada.

The theory of the Jujuy is that, if they twist Rodríguez Larreta's arm in the decisive Buenos Aires territory,

nothing will stop them from

recovering the space ahead that they still sing in their hundred-year-old anthem.

Manes has not confirmed anything yet, but he

already has a press consultant and strategists Daniel Ivoskus and Gastón Dowek

working on his candidate profile.

And it is known that nobody invests just in case in the selfish market of electoral politics.

Facundo Manes - Martín Lousteau, on the anniversary of the UCR.

A tireless reader of polls and reserved reports, Rodríguez Larreta admits in these hours that

the intern against Manes' radicalism is almost inevitable.

The goal has been to

seal the unity of the PRO

, with Mauricio, Jorge Macri and with Patricia Bullrich inside, whom he imagines in

a more relevant place

than he had originally thought. Difficult work if there is one of harmony, although dialogues between all of them are the order of the day. He wants to preserve Carrió. He does not even rule out that Vidal may evade the electoral challenge this year. And he will insist with the figure of Diego Santilli in

Buenos Aires adventure tourism.

In the harsh times of the crack, Rodríguez Larreta sets himself

exotic objectives such

as attending that strange tribute that the President dedicated to the thousands of deaths from the coronavirus.

He believes that the criticism he received for that greeting with the man who amputated a piece of the City's funds are

remnants of a minority fanaticism

and that they will not be able to affect him in his presidential bid.

The upcoming elections will give

a more precise idea

of the space that the pandemic will allow for consensus in the mortified spirit of Argentines.

Look also

The inmate in Province burns: the PRO and Elisa Carrió went out to attack Facundo Manes, who is advancing in his candidacy

Mauricio Macri came out to clarify his role in Together for Change: "I don't fight places or go inside"