Former president Mauricio Macri challenged his former partner and successor, the head of the Buenos Aires government, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (“I don't think he's encouraged”), and he picked up the gauntlet and was encouraged, privileging coalitional logic over partisan logic.
Both
put
the PRO internal to maximum tension, in which a dispute over the succession of leadership and candidacies is played more than a debate of ideas.
Although this will also be reflected, and increasingly, in how they position themselves in the face of electoral competition and the campaign discourse.
The crash was going to happen sooner or later, but its consequences are uncertain, as well as its capacity for self-inflicted damage.
Larreta needs to break spears with the shadow of "godfathership" to consecrate himself as a presidential candidate, especially considering that this godfather looks more favorably on his main opponent, Patricia Bullrich.
It also needs to enable the space to consolidate the coalition of Juntos x el Cambio with radicalism and the CC, which raises the prevention and suspicion of their co-religionists of the PRO.
And that is where Macri stands, appealing to the defense of party identity.
The cost of this confrontation can be high:
that what is won on one side is lost on the other
, and going to an internal one in which 1+1+1 is less than 3, wears down the competitors and scares away the voters natural or potential.
This is what game theory describes with the classic example of the
“chicken game”
: in which two motorists face each other, at a certain distance, and both must accelerate against each other.
The first to run will be "the chicken" and will lose the game.
He who does not depart, wins.
The problem of the game is that if neither runs,
both lose, because they collide
.
One of the central premises is that it is not possible to know a priori which player is the strongest: both have the same chances at the beginning of the game, they are measuring forces.
There are also the variants and unwanted consequences: that both are injured and with their bodies dented.
There is another possible game, guided by the
Prisoner's Dilemma
model , in which the two players may not cooperate due to lack of sufficient information, speculating on the opponent's attitude, but
they may also end up cooperating
when they understand that the incentive not to do so may be overcome by the threat of punishment.
The secret of the PASO is that
it is not a zero-sum game
: those who compete in an open internal must know that
winners and losers must pay tribute to the bigger competition
, the general election.
It seems that not everyone understands it that way.
They prefer to jump on the bandwagon and put their foot on the accelerator.
And they don't measure the consequences.
They are still on time.