In the last session of the Chamber of Deputies, Silvia Lospennato asked to suspend the direct election of Mercosur parliamentarians.
With her claim, the national deputy of Together for Change lit the fuse of a strong controversy that is in force behind the so-called Parlasur, whose renewal, paralyzed for eight years, seeks to reactivate the Government.
Although, as it did in 2015, the ruling party hopes to assign leaders to Parlasur who could be unemployed
in December 2023
if they lose the October elections and deputies and senators leave, the fight has something
transversal in the ruling party and the opposition.
It is that there is a story in which both the ruling party and the opposition were irresponsible and
could cost the State hundreds of millions of pesos, or more.
Because claims could be opened from all the parliamentarians who have remained since 2019 as "indefinitely"
charging per diem but not salary,
which the Macri government cut.
At the time it was approved that they would charge the same as a national deputy.
Kirchnerism sought privileges or destiny for its leaders after the triumph of macrismo in 2019. They were Parlasur legislators, among other acquaintances, the former current minister Jorge Taiana (now Defense), the current presidential spokesperson, Gabriela Cerruti;
or the leader of Tupac Amaru, Milagro Sala, who did not actually take office because she was imprisoned.
Macrismo also made controversy with the election in Parlasur of judicial operator Fabián Rodríguez Simón, accused by the Argentine justice system of being a fugitive in a legal case.
To the astonishment of the neighboring legislators, Parlasur
replicated unusual episodes of the internal political battle between Kirchnerism and Macrismo.
The controversy that Lospenatto now introduced on April 19 came to life because
the National Electoral Chamber recently incorporated direct voting for Parlasur parliamentarians into the 2023 election calendar
.
And it remains to be seen whether or not President Alberto Fernández will call this vote by decree of the PEN.
"Calling the direct election of Mercosur parliamentarians is nonsense, it makes no sense from a legal point of view
because the rest of the countries have suspended direct elections and it is economic nonsense
at this time of crisis to finance 43 more deputies who do not legislate and they can only make non-binding recommendations,”
Deputy Lospenatto
told
Clarín this Sunday.
Hours later, Lilia Puig and Armando Abruza, both members of Juntos por el Cambio, accused their roommate -but in the Argentine Congress- of committing "
surprising inaccuracies".
They told her after a series of technical explanations in which they defended the direct vote that "should know that the times of integration - as the experience of the European Parliament shows - are long and complex".
What has happened?
In 2019, Mauricio Macri and the presidents of Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, who had the same vision of adjusting expenses.
they signed an additional protocol for which the election of members of Parlasur was not called and in tune with the desire for an indirect vote, as proposed by Lospennato.
In this case, the Parlasur seats would be distributed among national legislators appointed by proposal of the political blocs).
But Kirchnerism challenged it and never wanted to approve it by Congress.
The Argentines from Parlasur have been in office for eight years, without an election and all politics turns a blind eye.
Consulted by
Clarín
, the Parlasur legislator and leader of Peronism from Corrientes
Alejandro Karlen
, who had won the first lawsuit in 2020 to get his salary paid as a Mercosur legislator,
opening the door to a cascade of lawsuits
for them to collect wages -maybe not he was able to collect what was then $8 million just for him- he said that what Lospennato proposed was not a matter of discussion.
“There is a Law 27120 that must be complied with, that Macri violated and that the National Electoral Chamber issued a ruling saying that parliamentary elections should be called together with the presidential ones and that is in force.
If the President does not convene, he would violate the Law, a court ruling and a Mercosur resolution signed by all the Presidents, ”he said and then defended Parlasur tooth and nail.
For his part,
Juan de Dios Cincunegui,
director of the CIDEIPP think tank of the School of Government of the Austral University, and a scholar of this issue, said that "the idea of a Mercosur deliberative body is correct."
However, "its implementation has proven to be, from Argentina, chaotic, and therefore highly criticized. It can be done better."
