The hour of politics or the hour of justice
Milei management enters its most transparent region.
He gambled everything on the bullet projects (DNU 70 and the Omnibus Law),
lost the battle
and has been left in the hands of the factor that this government least appreciates, which is politics.
He plunged Congress into a whirlwind of passions that ended on Thursday.
It opens today for a couple of weeks of vacation.
It doesn't mean that the tension has dropped
.
The most serious conflict is with the governors, who have gone en masse to court to demand the funds that the Government has suspended - subsidies, funds for teachers, etc. -.
It is
the hour of Justice
, say the governors, who have no channel of dialogue with the Nation.
From Justice the message is the opposite:
it is time for politics
.
That is the "by ear" jurisprudence that the
Supreme Court
coined in December.
They are not going to intervene immediately
to solve what politics cannot fix.
The provinces are going to present new resources to claim funds, such as those for transportation, which have legal basis and cannot be cut off by an administrative decision or by a decree.
The requests are based on the ruling issued by the Court on October 1, 2019. At that time,
Mauricio Macri
had issued two decrees lowering income taxes and VAT (a small plan in the same terms as Massa during the last year's campaign).
These two taxes are shared
.
The Court ruled that the need for these measures could be plausible, but that
the Nation had to compensate the cuts
to the provinces, because they responded to fiscal rules that can only be touched with new laws.
The same argument that the claims have now.
The fight with governors contaminates everything
The Supreme Court has its times.
Nothing indicates that for now there is progress in decisions that affect politics.
An
appeal
that is processed in the court of the original jurisdiction - the one that addresses the demands of the provinces -
does not take less than 3 years to be resolved
.
A
fundamental issue
, such as the Sancor case of 2015 - claim by Santa Fe, Córdoba and San Luis for pension cuts - took
8 years
to be resolved.
The Court also has other claims from the provinces, such as the cuts to the co-participating funds that the government of Alberto Fernández dictated to the administration of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta.
The current government has already said that it will not pay him, but
Jorge Macri is on the waiting list
before the governors affected by Milei.
The debate contaminates other layers of politics.
The governors of the PRO,
Rogelio Frigerio and Ignacio Torres
, met the previous week with
Patricia Bullrich
, who is part of the Government, and left without any solution.
As if Patricia did not belong to this government, which harms the governors of the party she presides over.
Situations like this undermine the strength of the PRO
at this time, because the attack on the governors takes away territoriality from the PRO just when Mauricio Macri is demanding support from within to be president of the party.
Are we going to be a party with a project or a partner that says yes to any idea from the Government? the two leaders asked themselves after the meeting with Bullrich.
Frigerio, by the way, believes that the case
is more political than legal
.
The problem of the provinces is not so much with the money from automatic transfers but with the
failure of the Nation to comply with what the law dictates
.
There is more money to discuss regarding what corresponds to the provinces by law than for non-automatic or discretionary transfers - except, adds Frigerio, in the case of the province of Buenos Aires.
Cristina's bear hug
The situation of a Government that did not take advantage of the opportunity to impose its agenda in extraordinary measures added a
novel factor
that few have noticed, which is the "resolution part" of the document that Cristina de Kirchner published the previous week.
The toasts and quarrels of friends and adversaries
stopped at the thick prose of the economic analysis
of that writing, which is as effective on reality as urinating on the walls of the Central Bank - a metaphor that the writer Azorín used to illustrate the vanity of the words on political matters.
But many did not notice
the former president's call for an agreement
on some points that are dangerously close to what four of the five presidential candidates who competed in the first round proposed - only Myriam Bregman departed from that unique speech.
These points are
the same as those that Milei proposed
for her treatment in Congress and that had 144 votes for general approval.
Cristina sends a message
to Peronism and the Government when she says that her force is willing to discuss, literally, the following:
"1.
Review the efficiency of the State
, and that the slogan of the “present State” is not enough to solve the country's problems, which are too many.
2.
Discuss a simplified tax system
with few taxes in quantity.
3.
Rethink the current public health system.
4. A
labor updating plan
that provides responses to new forms of labor relations.
5. The
integration of state companies
both through the participation of private capital and the provinces.
6. Discuss an
incentive regime for large investments
[the RIGI, central chapter of the government's omnibus law]."
Federico Sturzenegger could not have said it more clearly. It is the same reform plan that appears in the Cambiemos platform and that Pichetto and José Dromi described in their campaign book.
Marketing vs.
management
Did Cristina change?
In politics, personal attitudes do not matter.
Not even what is said.
In the world of liquid politics, the word is worth little.
Collective movements are valuable
, which render what individuals cannot render.
This diminishes the importance of temperaments, which so attract communicators and
newsreaders
when they make theories about images and tweets.
They wasted time before speculating about Menem's personality, Cristina's stridency and now about the indecipherable Milei.
This proposal was welcomed by Pichetto as a contribution to bringing the Government closer
.
What prevents Olivos from hearing this message, which adds to the gentleness of the caresses that Milei and Cristina have exchanged?
This is prevented by the Government's insistence on
prolonging its campaign for the second round
, which he won by adding his own vote to that of Cambiemos, with the mandate to remove Peronism from the government.
Peronism
is isolated
today by the effects of that defeat and is in a siege of discredit that turns its proximity into a poisonous stain.
It is a marketing problem, but not a program problem.
If she were not prevented by the need to maintain the image of rejection of Peronism, Milei could accept the approach that Cristina proposes regarding a program with which she cannot agree.
The contradiction between the
needs of Government and the needs of marketing
is what makes politics the art of solving the squaring of the circle.
What works for you to win, does not work for you to govern, and vice versa.
For this reason, politics is a profession of strange people, who trust that they can easily overcome what the rest of us cannot.
Congress strikes back
On Friday,
Martín Menem notified
Miguel Pichetto and Florencio Randazzo that in these hours
he will publicize which three names he chose
, of the four that the Peronism of the Chamber of Deputies proposed to him to join the
Commission that decides on the DNU
.
With this, he takes away from the opposition control over the destiny of the emergency decrees, which for the Government are the tool to administer from the minority.
The relationship with the opposition of the Frente de Todos is not the best.
The 99 votes that Peronism raised were the efficient factor that brought down the Omnibus Law - no matter how much the Government insists on blaming its friends for that defeat - and a spectrum of
"traitors" that no one has known who they are
.
The votes of Peronism and the left were added to those of the blocs friendly to the Government, which
rejected its attempt to get its hands on the trusts
that finance the provinces.
Germán Martínez, head of the Peronist bloc, acknowledged receipt of Menem's (Martín) refusal to give him the four members for the Commission.
He tries to get them to apply the d'Hont system so that they are given the four charges, but Menem has a higher reason for his actions, which is
not to leave Milei and his DNU in the hands of Peronism
.
Teachers join the fight
The Government raffled off the possibility of imposing the agenda, which is its privilege in extraordinary sessions.
Now, he has to
face the initiatives that legislators are going to propose
.
The first, and it is difficult for it not to have support from the majority of Congress, is to
save the Teacher Incentive Fund
that the Government froze for the provinces.
The debate is going to put on stage a
fearsome protagonist
, who are the
teachers
.
That sector has been central in other political crises in Argentina.
The white march of 1988 was key in the crisis of the
Alfonsín
government .
The white tent in Congress accompanied the crisis of
Peronism
in 1997 that ended with the defeat of 1999.
The expense involved in raising it under the administration of
Fernando de la Rúa
pierced its economy and defunded it at the worst moment.
Closer to now, a central factor in
María Eugenia Vidal
's defeat in 2019 was the failure of the teaching fight.
That defeat dragged him to Macri in the presidential elections.
Money laundering and retirements to the premises
The Hacemos bloc, chaired by Pichetto, dedicated the past week to designing some
initiatives that could have consensus in the Chamber
to undertake the new stage of ordinary sessions.
They belong to the fiscal chapter of the Omnibus Law that the Government canceled, like money laundering, and they could have consensus - previously Sergio Massa wanted a money laundering that the IMF asked of him.
Ricardo López Murphy and Oscar Agost Carreño work on this topic within the block.
Furthermore, the deputies of the Coalition - Juan Manuel López, Maxi Ferraro, among others - have already presented a
project to impose a new formula for updating pensions
.
It appeared in the minority opinion that they had presented for the omnibus law, and it had to be addressed after the government lowered its project.
This formula has a high consensus and foresees an
increase of around 40% in retirements
.
It proposes updating each month, retroactive to last January, by price index and some compensation bonus.
It is difficult for an initiative like this not to have the support of the majority of deputies.
State Machirulos
This project is
concurrent with the one presented by Representative Alejandra Torres
, which does not include a bonus and makes it more viable to pay.
Torres grows as a symbol to contrast with the Milei machirulo.
She kicked Osvaldo Giordano out of Anses, because his wife, Torres, voted against a section of the omnibus law.
It is an example of extreme machismo to punish a man because he sleeps with the enemy.
These bedroom investigations by another government that has state espionage services contradict values held by many, even voters of the current ruling party.
Nobody wants nepotism
- to govern with one's sister or with ethnic groups, be they Caputos or others - or for someone to be controlled by who makes their bed, or who unmakes it - Moria would say.
Not very opportune when March 8, Women's Day, approaches.
Although the same nerve that makes Milei say in the face of each defeat that it was actually what he wanted - the fallacious "principle of revelation" - leads him to take advantage of the so-called economy of reaction.
He consists of saying extravagant things to get them to respond and thus generate visibility.
A frivolity subsidized with public money.