With his signature stamped on the two nine-page resolutions that no one yet knew, Horacio Rosatti warned in the morning at the meeting of the United States Chamber of Commerce in Argentina: "We do not come to public office to make new friends." Close to the president of the Court, they preferred the football version, stamped on a famous flag that always decorates the stands of the Bombonera: "We never made friends." Rosatti is a famous Boca fan.
Those words made sense a few hours later, when it was learned that the head of the highest court and his for now solid allies Carlos Rosenkrantz and Juan Carlos Maqueda suspended the elections scheduled in San Juan and Tucumán for this Sunday.
Under a legal magnifying glass, the content of the resolution was expected: the same Court had stopped the re-election exuberances of Gerardo Zamora in Santiago del Estero (2019), the now restored Alberto Weretilneck in Río Negro (2019) and Sergio Casas in La Rioja, also in 2019. As in those cases, now it was a question of interpreting the Constitutions of San Juan and Tucumán to give the green or red light to the one that from both Peronist officialisms tried to differentiate the positions of governor and vice governor as different when counting the periods of government.
Although dozens of times the abacus of politics pretends – and a few achieves – surprising results for simple operations, the customary conclusion in Argentina is that voters always vote formulas, and the counter of years in power of any of its members is the same. Things are different in the United States, for example, where George Bush was Ronald Reagan's vice president for eight years and that did not prevent him from competing and winning the presidency in 1988.
The second shadow that hangs over Tuesday's resolution is its timing: five days before access to the polls was enabled. From the Court, they explain that the precautionary measures that were resolved reached the court on April 13 and 25 respectively, after the opinion of the prosecutor, which in both cases was signed by Laura Monti. That is to say that the times were brief, almost summary considering the Argentine judicial processes.
In truth, surprise and anger in the ruling party soared at that speed.
After having speculated until the last moment with the date of the provincial elections -whether or not it was convenient to keep them together with the presidential elections or not- and with the personal projects of both Sergio Uñac from San Juan and Juan Manzur from Tucumán -who prayed to the edge of law the possibility of being national candidates-, both designed a tight electoral calendar and as adjusted to their wishes as uncomfortable for their opponents. run over by that shrapnel of election dates.
And here we come: with that quick sleight of hand, an attempt was also made to evade justice, under the idea that it would not be issued in time to prevent the elections.
The Court's response, with lacerating mentions of "the republican virtue of discouraging the possibility of perpetuation in power" and "giving meaning to the notion of periodicity of mandates" ended the trick and fell like a kick in the political liver of the ruling party.
They had already tasted that bitter taste at the end of 2021, when the highest court ended the design of the Council of the Magistracy cranied by Cristina Kirchner in 2006 because the balance of the estates represented in the body had been broken, and especially last year, when it rejected the farce of a division of the Peronist bloc in the Senate to stay with another counselor also in the Magistracy.
The old pillerias that everyone accepted feigning dementia no longer run as before. Beyond the virulent – and painful – internal war that embarrasses the Court in front of society, this is the heart of the government's fury against its ministers. The attempt to impeach them and the avowed reasons for trying it are, perhaps, the clearest evidence of that sequence.
See also
Andrés Larroque, controversial after the Court's ruling on the elections in San Juan and Tucumán: "Peronism or national dissolution"
See also