Ignacio Ortelli
09/15/2021 1:27 PM
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 09/15/2021 1:27 PM
The Frente de Todos is boiling over.
In the midst of the tension and after a hard crossing on Sunday night after the resounding electoral defeat, Alberto Fernández and Cristina Kirchner met this Tuesday in the privacy of the Quinta de Olivos.
The meeting fuels speculation of changes in the Government, when the President seemed to buy time in his strategy to keep his staff, at least until November.
Although both sectors deny the meeting,
Clarín
learned from official sources that the vice president arrived at the residence at around 7:00 p.m.
"To analyze the election and order how we are going to turn around in November," said an official familiar with the meeting, who stressed the importance of reaffirming "unity."
Of the appointment, which followed the telephone conversation they had held on Monday, there are no more transcendent so far.
But it serves to order the internal ones.
For now, while in the Casa Rosada they still
cling to pointing out that "we must not wait" for variants
but
"redirect management"
With regard to the general ones, in internal discussions there is still debate about
the convenience of accelerating the changes and anticipating them or making them trickle
.
The move of the provincial Cabinet, to make the resignation available to Axel Kicillof, does not go unnoticed in Balcarce 50: it occurs after the Government retructed, before the request for changes made by Kirchnerism, that
if the President changes his team They should also do it in the Province
, because the governor also lost the election. "How timely, isn't it?" Ironically a collaborator of the President, when reviewing the words of the Minister of the Provincial Government, Teresa García, who said that the entire Cabinet "has made available" their resignations. "The governor will have to make the decision to choose with which team he wants to continue and with whom he will design his future cabinet," said the official on radio La Red.
Just as from the hard Kirchnerism they do not hide their discomfort with the direction and profile of the administration, and with some national ministers, especially the Chief of Cabinet, Santiago Cafiero, Martín Guzmán (Economy) and Matías Kulfas (Productive Development), the defeat in the PASO and the cruelty of the coalition partners with Fernández,
attributing all responsibility for the defeat
, unleashed officials surrounding the President. "We lost all. It was not only Alberto who lost. Cristina lost, Axel lost, Sergio (Massa) lost," they recall.
Although abroad the strategy of repeating again and again that there will be no changes is maintained, the debate inside the Government is growing on the advisability of waiting -or not- until November to oxygenate the ministers.
Those who believe in not touching the staff rely on two valid arguments
. The first maintains that, if until Thursday the public balance of Fernández was that the Cabinet had lived up to a time as complex as the pandemic, any retouching for the fall to Juntos por el Cambio would go against his own word and Consequently, the conviction of effecting a change in the area in question would lack credibility. "You have to pave the way to make changes, it is not overnight," they state.
Then, there are those who proclaim caution and not by assuming that it is a team that works.
"
If you make the changes now, what do we leave for November?
This is long ...", a senior official, one of the President's stalwarts, cuts himself off.
This opens up the other dilemma in the Frente de Todos.
Do any drip changes work?
"It has no effect to do something in installments. What changes if you remove Guzmán alone? How much does that announcement reach people? How does it change if (Security Minister, Sabina) Frederic goes alone? How many votes does he give that? ", asks a Cabinet minister, one of the few who still assures this Wednesday that
" there will be changes
.
"
While Fernández entrusted Cafiero and Guzmán to finish polishing the package of economic measures to be announced this Thursday, in political terms any definition will be taken between Fernández and Cristina Kirchner, together.
On Sunday,
as this newspaper published
, there was a conclave in the same bunker, in which there were harsh reproaches.
The faces of the vice president and the icy treatment of its President and the candidate anointed by him, Victoria Tolosa Paz, gave an account of this tension.
These visible differences only increased the dispute between second and third lines, perhaps a low box office aspect in the media debate but difficult to contain if it overflows.
Hence the importance of the conclave on Tuesday, to lower the tension.
It is that the discussion about the names in that field remains in the background and mutual reproaches emerge for the course: while hard Kirchnerism considers it necessary to redouble and bet on the radicalization of the management, in a format similar to that of Cristina's second term. , who saw in Fernández the possibility of re-allying with the vice and promoting a moderate Peronism,
are convinced that the election was lost for reasons that exceed the difficult situation of the economy
. "Talking about the economy is only a mistake. In 2019 people voted for Alberto and the path of moderation against Macri's neoliberalism. They did not vote for Cristina. It was a mistake to believe that," analyzes a friend of the President who boasts of tell him "all in the face".
Hours before the meeting with Cristina, at a lunch with mayors,
the President did not rule out making changes to his staff
, unlike the line he drew out.
Fernández knows the names that the vice wants out of the Executive, but at the same time that all of them are considered officials of his trust and that, if they are handed over, it would put him in a scenario of greater political vulnerability.
There are those who believe that to get out of that trap, they could resort to a Solomonic solution and order that one of each sector of the coalition leave, but no one wants to lose their troops.
Will Cristina have yielded?
Look also
Alberto Fernández after the PASO coup: the resistance of an overwhelmed president
Axel Kicillof's ministers made his resignation available to him
