Alberto Fernández looked at everyone around him, or seemed to do so, turning his head from one side to the other, although as if taking a general, somewhat vague look.
He adjusted the microphone.
And he spoke.
His speech opened the debate at the PJ National Council meeting
.
Neither Vice Cristina Kirchner nor her son, Deputy Máximo Kirchner, were there.
That morning, last Friday, the Head of State had once again paid attention to them, complying with one of the many requests made to him in public statements, and with variable tones.
Fernández had informed, through a video uploaded to his social networks, that
he would not seek his re-election.
“Well, as everyone knows, I have made
a decision about my candidacy…
”, he began by saying, more or less words, to elaborate on why he had done what he did.
The face-to-face audience that listened to him there, although he is on paper the President of the Nation, and also the President of the PJ, was not interested in listening to him too much.
The vast majority of it was made up of its rivals from Peronism, its most brutal opponents within the ruling party itself.
When Fernández finished his presentation, which was brief, he asked:
"Does anyone want to add something?"
The answer he received was this:
silence.
Fernández was prepared for hostilities.
He left the awkward moment with another proposal:
"Let's move on to another topic."
So yes, some of the party leaders asked to speak.
In forty minutes the match was over.
The PJ Council
set a date for the PJ Congress,
in which it will be discussed with greater emphasis and energy, who will be, or who will be, the Peronist pre-candidate to try to retain power in the next elections.
Fernández had decided to give up his re-election dream, a highly unlikely success scenario, after receiving
a “threat” from the PJ territorial bosses
.
Above all, from the Kirchners, who transmitted the pressure to him - through one of the officials who acts as an intermediary - with whom his boss no longer speaks, nothing more and nothing less than the K family and their allies.
“If you do not resign before the Council meeting,
we will do everything to you.
He's going to have a bad time.
We threw everything at him
”, was the “squeeze” that caused the President to convene his spokeswoman Gabriela Cerruti at midnight on Thursday, to record in the Quinta de Olivos the video that, at 9:53, the president uploaded to his account Twitter.
The audiovisual message had a curious title: “My decision”.
Whose decision to abandon the reelection could be, if not his, or at least the attempt to install that he was determined to put up that unlikely fight, but that it served to give him the feeling that he would not let his power fade so many times
? months
before December 10, the day on which he will hand over the command attributes of the Executive Power?
It doesn't matter anymore.
Among other officials he trusted, who would have alerted him to the threat of the PJ, rhetorical, but true,
one could mention his Chief of Staff, Agustín Rossi;
or his deputy chief of staff, Juan Manuel Olmos.
The President had no choice but to renounce his plan to extend that definition for a while longer.
The week had started badly for his management.
One more time.
On Monday, the price in pesos of the blue dollar had begun to rise with a vertigo that
generated panic in the Casa Rosada
, and unease in a society drowned by inflation and the slow but steady disappearance of the value of the national currency, the peso.
The versions and rumors of a possible devaluation shook the markets.
And they generated turbulence and anger in the Palacio de Hacienda, under the command of Sergio Massa.
In the Ministry of Economy they were convinced that the person responsible for this financial "run" had at least one person responsible.
It was the still chief adviser to the President, Antonio Aracre,
who had had lunch with Fernández.
Aracre is the author of a paper with economic proposals that, according to Massa's environment, only caused confusion.
Massa was flying with rage as he once again tried to stop the rise of the dollar whose cause – is the version he let go – has an explanation in the political rivalries that cannibalize the ruling party, than in other variables of the economy.
Aracre resigned.
The President spoke with Massa that same Tuesday and assured him that
he had not been responsible
for the "Aracre plan" being taken seriously by the most important players in the market, and also by political power.
On Wednesday, Massa visited Fernández at the Quinta de Olivos.
She starred in a Zoom of the pre-colloquium of the business organization Idea, which was held in Mendoza.
At the idea of the perhaps not so effective Cerruti, she herself
convinced them that she would take a photo of them together,
to try to deny the versions the link between them was broken.
Cerruti may be a worse photographer than a presidential spokeswoman.
The image of her was taken by herself with a cell phone.
Political communication theorists teach that broadcasting a photograph of a meeting between a President and his Ministry of Economy, with their faces covered by shadows, in bad light, and, to top it off, smiling on a day of financial crisis, is a
practice intolerable.
Both from an aesthetic and political point of view.
Fernández began to enter the trap that culminated in the PJ's threat that he would have a hard time if he did not get out of re-election.
To that message had been added another.
The governor of Buenos Aires, Axel Kiciloff, spoke with the Frente de Todos political table about the possibility of
splitting
the election of the Province of Buenos Aires from the general elections, the method used by other districts to get rid of a likely bad presidential candidate of the ruling party that could drag them to a defeat in their districts.
For Fernández, the fact that the Buenos Aires election was held before the general one led him to another dilemma: if the mayors, or even the governor himself, already had their victory assured, how would he go about encouraging the territorial leaders to work for his candidacy if disagreed with her?
The President had already experienced an aggressive party meeting for him, something that could have been repeated last Friday.
In February, he himself led the so-called meeting of the Frente de Todos Political Table, once again pressured by his rivals to accept dialogue with those who did not want to listen to him.
That day, at least two speakers subjected him to the rigors of the crudest PJ.
The new Secretary General of the UOM, Abel Furlán, said a hurtful phrase to his face: “Alberto, the factory workers speak to me with some hope about Cristina.
But you know what?
Nobody talks to me about you
”.
Compared to the truck driver Pablo Moyano, Furlán had the methods of a professional diplomat.
Moyano Jr. also took the floor in that other meeting and told him, always in his own way, perhaps because of the one that earned him the nickname "El Salvaje": "Listen to me Alberto, who is that asshole that you put as chief of staff who
is talking about a labor reform
”.
The President responded with tense calm: “He is my new chief of advisers.
And rest assured that he does not speak for the Government or for me: he gave a personal opinion ”.
Moyano replied: "Then why the hell don't you cut it?"
"The Savage", indeed, had been confused.
He wasn't talking about the chief of staff.
He had referred to the newly appointed chief of advisers to the Presidency.
It was Antonio Aracre.