As expected, and as this newspaper already anticipated,
the President is thinking about how to reset his government
.
The defeat of his attempt to pass the Omnibus Law was not just any defeat: it was
the first law that he sent to Congress
and it almost completely contained an economic and reform program broader than any other in recent decades.
Their project - to understand the importance it had in the presidential imagination, it is enough to remember the bombastic name they gave it - had been proposed from a base of extreme weakness in its legislative teams and perhaps for that very reason it was promoted as a fight between The whole and nothing.
It went wrong, and
Javier Milei seems to have taken note
of that situation.
For this reason, in the free moments he has left on his tour of Israel and Italy, he began to think about a new design for the political alliance that supports him.
To look for muscle,
the political force that the Casa Rosada has closest at hand is the PRO
.
Since in November 2023 Mauricio Macri and Patricia Bullrich detected that Macri voters were migrating to Las Fuerzas del Cielo to vote for Milei and decided to put themselves in front of that stampede,
the PRO and La Libertad Avanza began to blend in
.
The macristas verified it again in recent days.
After the fall of the Omnibus Law, as several of the PRO leaders confessed to
Clarín
, people's requests multiplied - in their family and relationship environment but also in restaurants and on the street - to integrate formally to the ruling party.
“Help Milei,” is the phrase that the Macrista bosses began to hear the most
.
According to journalist Ignacio Ortelli, the President is willing to promote the unification of the blocks of deputies and senators of the PRO and LLA before the start of the ordinary sessions on March 1.
That move would be the acceptance of the proposal that Macri himself had made a little over two months ago, when he offered Milei to unify the block of deputies under the leadership of Cristian Ritondo.
At that moment, Milei did not want to confront Macri, but she still ended up declining the invitation.
Mathematics - a science that the President knows well - indicates that this agreement will be insufficient.
If they are unified, the PRO and LLA will have 75 deputies, a number that - although it would be an improvement compared to the 38 ruling parties today - is
not enough to open sessions, nor to approve projects
, nor to ensure the validity of the DNU.
For this reason, the Government will have to think about a broader alliance than that.
Will the PRO be able to maintain its agreement of recent years with at least part of the radicalism?
Or will La Libertad Avanza be the one that will continue betting on specific arrangements with some Peronist governors?
The first attempt in this sense was pulverized with the fall of the Omnibus Law: the President made official the departure of the Anses of Osvaldo Giordano - a man of Peronism from Cordoba who today is led by Martín Llaryora - and of the Salta-based Flavia Royón of Energía, who comes from of the Sergio Massa/Gustavo Sánez axis.
In the future, then, the agreements to incorporate Peronists into the Government could have another form:
whoever arrives would have to present themselves with some type of power that can join
the official critical mass.
That mechanism, pardon the word, is the one that the caste knows best.
But hey, resets have those costs.
If not, the Government could deepen the give-and-take negotiations like the one it had with Osvaldo Jaldo from Tucumán, who had no problems putting aside his party affiliation to lend a hand to the legislative megaproject that Milei proposed.
There are many provinces that can offer themselves to this type of relationship, if the Government is willing to negotiate as tradition marks.
Although he will never say it in public, Macri had been anticipating for several weeks that this redesign of the official arrangement could arrive.
In December, in some reserved talks that he held at his Los Abrojos villa, the former president asked to “wait until March” to properly evaluate what type of relationship the PRO would have with Milei.
In those days, a newly inaugurated Milei strove to show that Macri had had no influence on the drawing of his cabinet.
That can change
.