For the Milei government, the stocks are worth a mass

The government paused its celebrations for Milei’s globalization in the United States and Brazil, and raised the need to lift the stocks as the most urgent problem of its administration. Moved to the political agenda, this objective now depends on the government maintaining the validity of DNU 846, which allows it to carry out bond exchanges, bypassing the restrictions of the Financial Administration Law.

So that Congress does not overturn the DNU, the government ended, for now, the debate on the 2025 budget project. He also increased the pressure on the blocs and governors with the capacity to control legislators, so that they no longer meet. The government pays whatever it takes as long as this does not happen in the week that begins, the last week of the regular session period. In the balance of priorities, the government believes that with stocks there is no future. If to lift it you have to incur other dysfunctions, such as governing by decree, without Congress and without a budget, Paris vaut bien une messe. From the caverns of power it is difficult to distinguish between civilization and barbarism. Doing so is a privilege of those who understand.

Several opposition tribes have requested a special session of Deputies for Tuesday with the aim of cornering DNU 846. They have resigned to deal with the law that regulates all DNU to clear the objective to be demolished. In a pincer maneuver, Peronism in the Senate hopes that on Thursday there will be a session, not yet called, also to overthrow 846. It depends on Villarruel. The fate of this operation, which the government considers more important than any other issue, will be resolved this Monday in a meeting at Government House between a dozen governors of what was the Cambiemos league, with the Minister of Finance Caputo and the chief of Francos Cabinet.

There the exchange chips will be placed on the table. Do you want 846? the governors will say. So approve a budget that includes the most appropriate version for everyonethat of the 5 points demanded by the governors. Nobody is very confident that there is any solution.

The tension reaches the point of affecting relations between Olivos and Victoria Villarruel. Javier Milei never considered it much and even affected its protocol precedences in the government’s inauguration ceremonies. He acts as if he had known what Villarruel told a Senate block leader about calling a session on Thursday to discuss 846: “- If a request comes in with the signature of five senators, I will call the session.” Villarruel has learned the lesson that a vice president has a minimum function to fulfill: break ties in votes, and take care to stay alive.

It is taught by one of the protagonists of the good series “The Diplomat”, which tells of a fierce fight in the White House to retain the position of vice president (Netflix, season 2, chapter 6). The deterioration of their relations is to be expected in a government whose leaders – Milei, Villarruel – have no party or references to support or contain their attitudes.

If they fight, it’s a personal fight and it stays there. Politics is a profession in which the protagonists do not say what they think, unless it is extremely necessary. What sense does it have for the public to know what Milei thinks of Villarruel if it is neither the cause nor the effect of a political act? Even more so when what was said is made known in dialogue with a TV host who acts as spokesperson.

The weakness of communicators in the face of the words of power whose significance, in the case of this president, prescribes 24 hours, is moving. It costs him nothing to go from anti-Chinese to Chineseist. You must laugh at how, with so little, he entangles the cable hermeneutics with the lexicon that his spokespersons install in the talking heads.

The cold ran through Olivos, as the only thing that was admitted for this week of the legislative year was the chief of staff’s report scheduled for this Wednesday. Guillermo Francos has postponed that task several times; It hasn’t been going since May. He asked for time because after the report before the Deputies he ended up hospitalized.

The friendly blocks offered him to go to an informal meeting the week before to chat over a friendly session and with gentle questions. That never happened and now Francos goes to the Senate in the face of a dog.

Senator Francisco Paoltroni had cast the gypsy curse a year ago. Villarruel took over the position of provisional president, promised to Paoltroni by Milei, to give it to Bartolo Abdala. “He was nominated by the president as provisional president of the senate (…) as the president said, the one who pays the bills,” Paoltroni complained in public.

For the government, 846 is not just a financial formula. It is also a political shortcut to avoid a stint in court hell. It has already happened to the managers of other mega-swaps that deserved reproach, such as Domingo Cavallo, Santiago Bausili, Federico Sturzenegger and others.

The program to recompose the external front depends on Argentina collecting more dollars – and cheaper ones – through a reshuffling of debt papers. This will allow you to extend the maturities of new papers to longer terms, in order to be able to lift the various traps that corner the exchange market..

The most compromised is the trap that controls individuals’ access to dollars for shopping and tourism. Another is the one that retains the stock of dollars cornered by exchange controls on foreign trade. An exchange of papers with the liberality that DNU 846 gives to the Treasury will allow the government to open the restrictions that weigh on other transactions such as the transfer of dividends from companies, insurance taken abroad or that which affects the business of the provision of services abroad.

The law modified by 846 authorizes a debt exchange if at least two of three requirements are improved: amounts, terms and/or interests of the original operations. With the new DNU, future subscriptions of public debt instruments, “regardless of their payment currency, can be carried out with public debt instruments whatever their payment currency. The prices of the instruments will be set taking into account the existing values ​​in the markets for each of the operations”.

The government is intransigent in its defense of zero deficit and says that the fiscal cost of the 5-point demand is very high. The governors of JxC do not want to fight with the Nation and even settle for à la carte aid depending on the client’s appearance. They would want a budget to get out of the confinement to which the Executive power subjects them: negotiate with each one separately and reach a la carte agreements according to the degree of friendship.

This rogue resource works because any co-participating item, according to the governors’ request, primarily feeds the province of Buenos Aires. The bastion of Christian Peronism is the main threat to non-Peronism and the last thing it would do is feed it more.

Three of the governors’ claims demand that they be shared: 1) the ATN funds; 2) the vacant resources from the fuel tax and 3) the 10% that today go to the AFIP for administration. In all these areas, the province of Axel Kicillof takes the largest portion. This reality contradicts the fiscal health and political opportunity of the Nation and of non-Peronism, which has elections next year.

Until now the government has rejected this list of conditions that gained importance when Mauricio Macri expressed his support for the call of the provincial leaders. Furthermore, he instructed his bloc to use those 5 points as a negotiating piece. The PRO bloc is the most important tool that the government has to approve or veto something in Congress. Macri’s threat to play with the governors collapsed everything that the ruling party had put together to have a normal end of the year in Congress.

The PRO already manages the government in the Chamber of Deputies. If he now adds the control of a dozen governors, Macri’s strength casts a cone of shadow on the government to the extent of his weakness. Once again the agenda is embodied in a conspiracy of the weak. No one has the strength to negotiate because the result of a negotiation arises from ceding power between the parties.

He who has no power cannot give what he does not have. Henry Kissinger x-rayed power in his first book, written to understand how Europe achieved, through negotiation, a lasting peace after Napoleon. He observed that “It is almost impossible for the man who has exercised command to negotiate, because negotiation means admitting finite power.”

It is impossible to ask leaders who entered their positions as newcomers to the position to have the experience that would indicate the convenience of negotiating. “Moderation in the hour of triumph is only appreciated by posterity and almost never by contemporaries, for whom a moderate tends to appear as someone who gives up unnecessarily.” (Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1862-1822. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1957).

By imposing the transactional method, the government feeds the very fragility of being a minority. Instead of seeking agreements, he exasperates with attacks on all sectors using the same tactic that Néstor Kirchner used to deny legitimacy to all the agents of power construction, institutional and personal, who could shed light on the low legitimacy of his access to the presidency in 2003.

Son, like Milei, of the legality of the ballot, Kirchner had just lost the elections with Carlos Menem and was godson of the godfather Duhalde representing one of the three lists into which Peronism had been divided. He walked towards 2007, a date on which he could not even be re-elected, denying legitimacy to political parties, the Church, the military, business leagues, unions, and journalists. He even tried to delegitimize the past, which he sought to repair in his favor with a shift in Peronism’s policy toward reviewing the dictatorship.

The insult to Alfonsín on March 24, 2004 has the same meaning as that of Milei in Córdoba. Kirchner spoke in 2004 of “the shame of having kept silent about so many atrocities during 20 years of democracy.” Milei accused Alfonsín, 20 years later, of being a “coup plotter.” Kirchner at least asked Alfonsín for forgiveness.

Milei, when he received the radical governors, justified himself: “And? “I am an economist and I also criticize economists.”. And he changed the subject. The tactic of delegitimization explains why Milei does not want to have anything to do with the leaders who build power, even if they share his objectives. That is why he does not want to have anything to do with Macri, nor Pichetto, nor López Murphy, nor with Negri, nor with Juan Carlos Romero, nor with the governors, nor with the union members, nor with the journalists. He came alone and wants to remain alone.