The Argentine electoral system provides for presidential elections every four years and partial renewals of Congress every two years.
This guarantees that the president who takes office
is forced to coexist and negotiate
with a good portion of legislators who won elections or who entered the Senate or Deputies in previous turns.
This regime is combined with a bizarre presidential election mechanism
, which has mandatory primaries, first and second rounds.
Legislators are elected in the first round and the president may end up being proclaimed in the runoff.
In turn, most gubernatorial elections are held on dates other than the presidential election.
Javier Milei is
the result of the most unfavorable combination that this scheme contemplates
: he does not have any governor of his own, he became president with a party without any previous history and won his position in the runoff, after losing in the first round against Peronism. , who got more deputies and senators than him.
To graph this complexity in another way, it can be said that the creator of this paradox is the electoral roll itself: in a single electoral year,
Argentine voters appointed moderate governors and mayors
, a President with libertarian and
rupturist
ideas and a Congress with a vast majority of legislators opposed to Milei.
This week, the President
was able to see firsthand the results of that situation
.
The votes he obtained in the runoff helped him put him in the Casa Rosada, but
to govern he needs other things
.
One of these shortcomings, seen at first glance, is that
the Executive Branch does not know how to ensure that its projects and ideas become
political measures.
A bill is one thing - which can have defects and virtues - and a law is another thing.
One of the dialogue governors who worked for the Omnibus Law to come out says it: “
The incompetence of the Government is incredible
.
They do not manage in any of the areas, but in this case, the legislative strategy was directly nonexistent.
They never made, for example,
a spreadsheet showing how each deputy voted
.
They called the governors to ask us how the deputies of our province voted, instead of asking them and then, if they have a problem, asking us to pressure them.
They don't have a single deputy who knows
.
You always have to have at least one.
He is unusual.”
How do you get out of that situation?
The political crisis in which the President became entangled less than two months after taking office can be resolved in two ways.
One is to govern within the limits already imposed by the opposition
, at least until the legislative renewal of 2025. Milei could govern by sending Congress a minimum package of laws each year that allows him to carry out his administration, manage himself with ministerial resolutions and some decrees. on specific issues, try to isolate the efforts of the Minister of Economy and the president of the Central Bank from daily confrontation and wait for them to manage to lower inflation and mitigate some of the other problems that the President inherited.
The other option is to reset the Government
, change important members of the Cabinet and, above all,
expand the coalition that supports the Executive Branch
.
In the latter case, the key man would be
Mauricio Macri
, who already proposed at the start of the Government a parliamentary agreement between the PRO and La Libertad Avanza that was rejected by Milei.
Macri is following the crisis from Patagonia.
The former President
will celebrate his birthday this Thursday
at his home in Cumelén, the gated community of Villa La Angostura where he spends his summer vacations.
He will reach retirement age, but he doesn't plan to retire anytime soon
.
Next week he will return to Buenos Aires and will not remain silent.
If things go as expected, in just over a month
he will assume the presidency of the PRO
, and everything indicates that there will be an agreement with Patricia Bullrich so that the Minister of Security will keep one of the vice-presidencies of the party.
Macri's idea is to reorganize the PRO, keep the largest number of leaders inside and call for a generational renewal in a space that, with the appearance of Milei, lost almost all of its possible young voters and that today
fights to maintain its identity.
in the face of a speech that repeats something similar to what Macri always demanded but turned towards the extreme.
No one around Macri wants to say it, but in recent days
the idea, or perhaps resignation, of Macri's joining
the Milei government began to circulate.
For that to happen some things will have to change.
One of them is that the resistance to Macri falls within the Government, led by the Chief of Staff, Nicolás Posse - very close to the President - and Guillermo Francos, Minister of the Interior.
The other modification that Macrismo expects is tributary to the first: is Milei willing to end what appears to be a tacit agreement with Massismo and remove from their places the officials who function as allies of the former Peronist candidate?
If it becomes a reality, this new alliance, which
can provide Milei with experienced officials
, will start with
a shortage problem
.
“With the PRO and LLA it is not enough, that was clear with the Omnibus Law.
The Government needs to expand even more, but for that, Milei's decision is missing,” warns another of the dialogue governors.
The leader who speaks is one of those who believes that the Government does not have much time to make the changes.
He knows it because he knows well how Peronism wants to stop in the face of the ruling party's crisis.
This Wednesday, he and his colleagues had a test of that strategy.
When the morning was not over,
Axel Kicillof broke the ice in the chat
held by the governors of the 24 provinces and made the first intervention in the group since the fall of the Omnibus Law and the President's attack on the governors of the UCR and pro.
Kicillof posted a screenshot of a TN title:
“From Israel, Milei called the deputies who sought to change the Omnibus Law criminals
. ”
It was one more match on the bonfire.