Milei has 4 days left without Congress
The country enters the
most slippery week
since the government took office last December.
The weakest President in history challenged the powers of the State with exceptional instruments such as DNU 70/23 and the Omnibus Law project.
They have not helped him to begin to govern.
Raise the banner of zero deficit for the month of January,
at the cost of not paying debts
, a process that is difficult to prolong over time.
He faces the resumption of the legislative year in conflict with the provinces over the distribution of income.
He forces the patience of the leadership, and that of the public, to the extreme in an issue that, in the past, and in other countries of the world, has been the cause of civil wars.
Argentina
is a peaceful and tolerant country
, which has just voted to expel the Fernández government, an elastic resource that Milei takes advantage of to put the country in a deliberative state.
In the time he has been in office, nothing has gone well for him.
Now he has four days of legislative recess left to take exceptional measures that will allow him to take advantage of the bloc of governors from all parties, who have turned against him.
Speaking plainly and without taboos,
he has four days to intervene in one of the provinces
that have risen up against his policy of breaking the financial consensus that he inherited from the previous government.
The “self-satisfied” hand
The day provides a
scenario of uprising
that will occur at 7 this Monday in Rawson.
Governor Ignacio Torres, his cabinet, the national and local legislators of the province, unions and oil and gas businessmen will attend a session of the Legislature to support
Chubut's rejection of the withdrawal of federal co-participation funds
.
At that time, the provincial government hopes that the federal justice system will resolve a request for a
"self-satisfactory measure"
that Torres presented on Friday, so that the payment of the withheld co-participation can be reinstated.
Chubut already had success with another "self-satisfied" one the previous week, which rejected the removal of funds for the transportation subsidy that the Nation had ordered.
Self-satisfactory measures are
a figure that surpasses protection because they begin at the end
.
It is about protecting serious, exceptional and urgent situations in a very short process.
They seek to "solve the conflict through a brief process, unlike other procedural tools that are not always suitable for this purpose..." (Porras & Puliafitto. 2021).
A self-satisfactory ruling
is equivalent to a final ruling
with the authority of res judicata.
So it remains firm.
If it prospers, it will be a cannon shot in defense of the trust fund to support the provinces that dates back to the Cavallo administration in Economy.
(Arts. 1711° and concordant of the Civil and Commercial Code of the Nation)
Two fans face to face
The conflict with Chubut has its exceptionalities.
He faces two leaders who are, let's say benevolently,
in the four-person political room
.
Milei came to office due to the institutional domino of the runoff, the result of the collapse of Peronism and Cambiemos.
Peronism tried to retain the government by putting the minister of inflation accompanied by his chief of staff as candidates from a formula of metropolitan Peronism.
He ignored the Peronism of the interior
, which has been part of the formula in every competitive election.
Let's change I had
two experiences to play with
.
One was the
successful
one, by Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, who with Macri and a partnership with the UCR, have successfully governed CABA for 16 years.
An experience that the vote supported, that no one seriously discusses and that it was in their best interest to take advantage of, expand and perfect.
The other experience was the one that had
failed
in 2019 and that Macri represented.
The party leadership sent the coalition to a suicidal STEP that denounced the terms of the alliance that had allowed it to govern Argentina for eight years, the 4 of Macri as president, and the following 4, when he controlled Congress.
The leadership error, as deep as that of Peronism, made Milei president, who
was fed by the subsidy of Peronism
- supervision, funds, candidacy - and Macrism, who ran the campaign for him, scared by how Milei took away the conservative public. inland.
In two years, Cambiemos lost 18 percentage points of the electorate, blurred its project, chose the worst formula, and Milei went from having two deputies in 2021 to being president.
The weight of the unionists
Torres' case also retains him in the period of a politician's elementary education.
In 2019 he was elected national deputy, in 2021 senator and in 2023 governor for the PRO,
a party chaired by Patricia Bullrich
, who this Sunday relaxed him with aggressive statements that seem to be the pledge of his permanence in the cabinet.
Milei
already kicked Osvaldo Giordano out of Anses
, because "he slept with the enemy. His wife is Alejandra Torres, who belongs to Miguel Pichetto's Hacemos bloc, and who voted against the poisonous section of the omnibus law.
The weakness of the two contenders is an ingredient of this crisis that compromises the hydrocarbon-producing states,
including Neuquén, Chubut and Santa Cruz
.
They are provinces where union power is stronger than political power.
The governor of Santa Cruz Claudio Vidal is a
serial killer
of politics, he took all the Kirchners in his district out of the court - Máximo ended up exiled in Buenos Aires.
Vidal is
general secretary of the Private Oil and Gas Union of Santa Cruz.
The first national deputy of Chubut is Jorge "Loma" Ávila, who leads the same union in his province.
If the Patagonians plan to interrupt the flow of hydrocarbons to the rest of the country, the unions are the only ones who can do it with a strike.
Ghosts I: federal intervention
Intervening, for example, the rebellious province of Chubut is
the responsibility of Congress
.
During the legislative recess, the President can use the same power that Mauricio Macri took in 2015 to appoint two judges of the Supreme Court.
But Art. 75, Inc. 31 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to "approve or revoke the intervention decreed, during its recess, by the Executive Branch."
This extreme of intervening in the province that has threatened to cut off the supply of hydrocarbons since Wednesday
seems to be in line with the presidential will to escalate conflicts
as a tool of government.
Until now it has not worked for him and reality - the other powers - have stuck with DNU 70 and the Omnibus Law.
If the forces unleashed in the last hours are measured, it is expected that Congress will revoke that intervention and leave open
another institutional abyss, which is the impeachment trial
.
Ghosts II: The Political Trial
Milei had
154 votes against a section
in the particular treatment of the Omnibus Law.
According to the Constitution, the impeachment of the president can begin with 2/3 of the votes of the deputies present in a session of Deputies (art. 53).
In the event that a session begins for that purpose, with the minimum number of 129 seats present, about 86 would be enough to formulate the accusation before the Senate.
It is
also difficult to imagine this extreme
, but until a week ago no one imagined that the Chubut case would move governors like Jorge Macri, Alfredo Cornejo or Rogelio Frigerio to stand in front of the national government in defense of Ignacio Torres.
The events of the last few hours have loosened the light ties of many behaviors.
Nor did anyone imagine that a measure like the one denounced by Chubut
could compromise three governors whose election the PRO celebrated as its own
: Ignacio Torres, Claudio Vidal and Rolo Figueroa.
Not that a measure by Milei, whose government many PRO leaders wanted to go overboard like privateers, would put them on the brink of division.
If Milei did not want this, it is
another defeat for his government
because it destroys the support that Macri's party gives him.
If Milei looked for it, talking about intervention or impeachment is not nonsense.
Back to 1810
The recurrent crises in Argentina give rise to conflicts and the protagonists quickly turn to the underlying discussion of the institutions.
It is common for opponents
to accuse each other of promoting destituent situations
.
The Kirchner governments accused the opposition of actions of this type.
The
opposition to the current government denounces the bullet projects
(DNU 70 and the Omnibus Law) for disguising, under the protection of emergencies, a reform of the Constitution.
The text of the document the governors of Patagonia in defense of the Chubut funds advance with
prose that could be described as destituent
.
They talk about the United Provinces of the South.
A geostationary metaphor, but one that evokes the national state of the emancipation of the Spanish viceroyalty.
It is the
name of Argentina in the declarations of 1810 and 1816
.
This document is sharp and precise: “Taking away from a province more than a third of its share is a criminal action that pursues the deliberate objective of making its inhabitants suffer in order to force its government to adopt certain political decisions.”
The author of the text that the governors sign is the vice-governor of Chubut,
Gustavo Menna
, a constitutional lawyer who was a national deputy for the UCR between 2017 and 2021 and who until his assumption of the current position in 2023 was an advisor to Mario Negri in the interblock of Let's change.
He brings science and experience to the task and Torres relies on him.
In the act that Torres held on Friday, he threatened to cut off the sending of resources and announced that the governors would issue a statement.
When the event ended, Menna asked him: “And where is the document?”
“-It doesn't exist, you're going to have to write it yourself,” he replied.
When Torres endorsed it with other governors, he gave it the title: “The united provinces of the south.”
It is
also the ending of the lyrics of López y Planes' anthem of 1813
.
Federals vs.
unitary
The document points out that the Nation's decision is a
denial of federalism
.
“We do not accept patterns of stay or the unitarism of those who believe they will be able to trample on the provinces.”
Antonio María Hernández, who was a constituent at the three levels (national, and in Córdoba in the provincial and municipal reform), affirms that "we have hyperpresidentialism and fiscal unitarism. In this last and current constitutional design of federalism, coordination was established and concertation".
This criterion of concerted federalism is
incorporated into the Court's jurisprudence
when it has said that the Nation cannot cut off funds to a province without a prior agreement.
The so-called SanCor ruling of 2015 forced the Nation to replace funds deducted from co-participation and is the most solid exposition of that principle.
One of the signatories is Juan Carlos Maqueda, who was also a constituent, also at the national, provincial and municipal levels - his province is Córdoba.
The
criterion was repeated by the Court
in the ruling of October 2019 that stopped the reduction of Profits and VAT for the basket, a reduction that Macri dictated as his silver plan for the elections of that year.
It was after losing the presidential PASO.
This decrease affected the co-participation of the provinces
.
In the ruling that admits the protection of the CABA against the Nation for the funds to pay for the Buenos Aires police, the Court once again established the validity of concerted federalism.