Javier Milei faces his first massive challenge in the streets.
The general strike of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the largest labor union in the country that called a month ago for a mobilization against the president's economic policies, has become a massive call to the streets against the new Government.
Unions, social movements and unions, but also artists, tenants or retirees, will march at the doors of Congress this Wednesday against the dismantling of the State that Milei seeks through a decree and a megalaw with which he intends to gain emergency legislative powers .
Social organizations expect at least 40,000 people in the center of Buenos Aires.
It will be the third time that the Argentine capital has experienced a massive protest against the president who has been in power for a month and a half.
On December 20, when Milei had been in power for just 10 days, thousands of people took to the streets in Buenos Aires hours before the president announced on television his great decree to deregulate the economy, and on the 27th, while the Prices skyrocketed due to the devaluation and fiscal adjustment, social organizations and unions convened again to present before the Court an injunction against the labor reform proposed in the decree.
In the middle, the cacerolazos and spontaneous calls from retirees, tenants, environmental activists, cultural workers or some unions, from nurses to bank or tire workers, began to multiply while the country tries to dissect the infinity of changes that Milei has proposed based on his megalaw and his decree.
This Wednesday's call, the CGT's first general strike in five years, encompasses all these demands.
The hundred union organizations that the Confederation includes, led by truck drivers, health care workers and service station workers, will be joined by the state workers unions, the transporters, the press union and all social movements included in Peronism and led by the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy, the union of informal workers.
Even the political opposition to Milei has decided to participate in the strike.
The Peronist Axel Kicillof, governor of the province of Buenos Aires and the most visible face of Peronism that has just left central power, has confirmed that he will attend the march to Congress accompanied by other mayors who govern the most populated province with him. from the country.
His joining the strike represents another chapter in his bad relationship with Milei: while the central government announced that it will deduct the day from the salaries of state workers, Kicillof has announced that he will respect the right to strike of his workers. province.
The twenty parties that make up Unión por la Patria, the Peronist alliance that lost the elections against Milei, have joined the strike, but with former president Cristina Kirchner or the former Minister of Economy and candidate Sergio Massa out of the scene, Kicillof will perhaps be the highest profile of its space to participate in the demonstration.
Milei has reproached Argentine unionism for creating “two Argentinas.”
“There is one that wants to stay in the past and in decadence, and another that puts us on the path to being a developed country, which is what we propose,” the president accused on Monday in an interview.
On Tuesday, his spokesperson, Manuel Adorni, was even harsher, accusing the CGT of being “on the wrong side of history” and “against working people.”
The idea of opposing workers and protesters has had a deep impact on the Government and its voters.
According to a survey by the University of San Andrés, a private institution, the Government's intention to impose prison sentences on protesters who block streets during protests is one of the measures with the greatest popular approval.
This Wednesday's protest, called for three in the afternoon in Buenos Aires, will be a challenge for the Milei Government, which has established a new protocol against demonstrations that allows the intervention of security forces if the streets are blocked by the protesters and threatens to make the organizing organizations pay “the expenses” of the police mobilization.
Pablo Moyano, leader of the truckers union, stated this Monday that the strike will be “multi-party and peaceful,” and that he hopes it will serve to convince the deputies opposed to Milei to vote against his megalaw on State reform, which is week it should be voted on in the Lower House of Congress.
“We are workers.
We are neither orcs nor paramilitary groups, but we are going to express discontent with these measures that are being applied," he said, and ironically against the protocol against demonstrations promoted by the Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich: "How do you put the hundreds of thousands?
Upa [in arms]?
Do I take 40,000 truckers in single file?
"It's impossible. It's part of the media show that she wants to impose, that no one chases her away."
Bullrich replied: “If Moyano wants, he can take the workers to the upa, but we are going to comply with the protocol.”
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