The uncertain future of Milei's megadecree has Argentines in suspense

The Argentine Supreme Court has returned this week from its summer vacation with a pile of work after the inauguration of Javier Milei and will have to decide on one of the issues that has ignited the debate in the country: the great economic deregulation decree presented by the president on December 21, more than 300 reforms that ranged from the dismissal of thousands of state employees to the property rental regime.

The executive rule has been in force since December 29, but there are at least a hundred lawsuits against it and some courts have already stopped reforms, such as labor flexibility or non-discretionary increases in private health insurance.

There are still open lawsuits, even against the entire decree, which will begin to be dealt with by the highest court to define the future of the decree.

Actors of all kinds have opposed the decree.

From the province of La Rioja, in the northwest of the country, which seeks to stop the decree in its entirety, to the Central Confederation of Labor (CGT), whose protection against the labor reform was endorsed by the Chamber of Labor.

In the case of the latter, on January 30, the appeals court decided to annul the entire labor reform that limited the right to strike, eliminated sanctions on employers for irregular contracts, authorized work days of up to 12 hours a day or enabled changes in compensation.

The Government will appeal to the latter in the Supreme Court.

“Each instance will be appealed,” said presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni.

The Court also announced during the judicial fair that it will deal with the appeal from the province of La Rioja starting in February.

The governor, the Peronist Ricardo Quintela, presented at the end of December a declaratory action of certainty, that is, an appeal to control the constitutionality of the megadecree.

Quintela considered that the initiative “produces irreparable harm” in Argentine society and affects “multiple productive and economic activities” and “legal relations” in the province.

The Attorney General's Office ruled this week that the Court must intervene in the lawsuit filed by the province.

The judges will study it from now on and do not have a deadline to resolve the case.

In addition, a protection from the Liga Deportiva de Salto, a football association in the province of Buenos Aires that opposed the landing of private capital in Argentine professional football, has been validated in court, and the deregulation of increases has been suspended. of private health insurance prices in specific cases, such as the lawsuit of a 78-year-old retiree who claimed that he could not afford the payments with his pension.

Even veterans of the Malvinas War have mobilized against the decree: a center of ex-combatants in the city of La Plata, south of the city of Buenos Aires, achieved the suspension of the repeal of the land law, which limits sale of Argentine territory to companies or individuals from abroad.

These are just some of the lawsuits against the decree that have found their way in the courts.

There are more than a hundred pending.

The federal justice system, however, rejected two appeals against the decree in its entirety, one from the Observatory of the Right to the City, an NGO from Buenos Aires, and another from the civil association Gente de Derecho, an organization of lawyers from the Argentine capital. .

For the federal judge who reviewed them, Enrique Lavié Pico, none of them met the need to prove the “illegality and arbitrariness” that supported both lawsuits.

“It is very dynamic, [judicial appeals] continue to be filed all the time.

There are easily more than 100,” explains Pablo Salinas, political scientist and political consultant.

For Salinas, the Court will begin to give “concrete news” about its resolutions next week and the jurisprudence, he explains, is contrary to the will of the Government.

“The times that it has happened that the Executive Branch wants to advance on certain matters, mainly labor and some administrative law, [the Court] has pulled it back so that [the Government] turns to the Legislative Branch.

If the Court agrees to certain issues of the DNU, it would be a 180-degree change,” says Salinas.

The political scientist points out that if this happens it would be “creating a very complicated precedent for Argentina”: “It changes 100 years of the country's legal history.”

“Today La Libertad Avanza does it, but tomorrow another Government could do it.

The Executive has to dialogue and have coexistence with the Legislative Branch and the Judicial Branch,” he points out.

The Peronist social leader Juan Grabois expressed it this way after Milei imposed the DNU: “If tomorrow I have to be president and I define an agrarian reform, an urban reform, put caps on rental prices, nationalize strategic companies and what I do for DNU, am I going to be able to do it too?”

Congress, another firewall

The judicial front is not Milei's only headache.

Congress discussed throughout January the other leg of its Argentine refoundation: the

omnibus law

with which it pursued another 600 reforms, such as the privatization of 41 public companies, higher taxes on exports or even emergency legislative powers for the president throughout his term. .

The law deflated while the Government gave in on its claims seeking consensus and was approved on Friday with almost half of the articles of the original project.

The initiative will be submitted to a second vote in which legislators will vote to approve or reject the articles one by one next Tuesday;

Then it will go to the Senate.

The debate in the Chamber of Deputies took place while tension was growing in the streets: on Wednesday and Thursday the security forces repressed the protests in front of Congress.

The debate has had citizens hooked during a bitter summer vacation and the legislators themselves busy, who did not form the bicameral commission to analyze the decree within the established deadline.

After the executive rule came into effect, at the end of December, Congress had 10 days to form a bicameral commission of eight senators and eight representatives to analyze whether the “need” and “urgency” of the executive rule are justified.

Once the deadline to do so had expired, the Peronist Union for the Homeland requested a special session to address the megadecree on Thursday, but the vice president, Victoria Villarruel, delayed the call.

Therefore, the validity of the executive rule, for now, is in the hands of justice.

Distraction and confusion have been Milei's ways during his first two months in office.

The decree and the law have driven union members, retirees, tenants, artists, climate activists and thousands of self-convened people to the streets, each with a point against the great reform that the Government plans to carry out.

Even football fans.

In December, the members of Boca Juniors, one of the most popular teams in the country, mobilized in tens of thousands to elect former player Juan Román Riquelme as president of the club, who presented himself as a containment dam for the aspirations of Mauricio Macri. , former president of the nation and the club, who aspired to return to power as one of the promoters of the landing of joint stock companies in Argentine football.

While the opposition most critical of Milei repudiates the president's intentions to concentrate public power, the Government demands that they be allowed to govern.

The president has stated that there are “two Argentinas” in the country today.

“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,” he said in a television interview.

It is true that other Argentine presidents have governed by imposing a large number of decrees: the Peronists Eduardo Duhalde did it, after the 2001 crisis, or Alberto Fernández, during the covid-19 pandemic, when the emergency was clearly justified;

Néstor and Cristina Kirchner and the conservative Mauricio Macri also used this tool of the Constitution.

But the number of articles that Milei's DNU brings together—hundreds of articles imposed in less than a month of Government—is exceptional.

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