Milei cleans the file

The government is betting on a new year’s celebration with fireworks. It has a global agenda with the inauguration of Donald Trump, the Davos supporters group, following a campaign in favor of the Venezuelan Edmundo González Urrutia to validate his status as the elected successor of Nicolás Maduro.

Third world symbolism that must be compensated with some conducive effectiveness and overcome some domestic setbacks with which 2024 ended – the Kueider embarrassment, which won a senator from the opposition, the pact with Christianity to delay Clean File in exchange for the re-election of Martín Menem in Deputies.

The repechage will be played on Tuesday of this week by Guillermo Francos, who returns from a mini-vacation in Nordelta. He has to decide the terms of the exchange that the government will propose to the PRO, his main support in Congress.

The government will resume the initiative of bringing the Clean File project to Deputies in exchange for the PRO providing the votes for the suspension or abolition of the PASO. The delegates of the parties advanced their positions this weekend.

On the side of the ruling party, the vice chief of staff José Rolandi and the secretary of relations with Congress, Oscar Moscariello. On the PRO side, Cristian Ritondo, who sails without lights until it clears, but responds to Olivos’ calls. Rolandi and Moscariello were the only high-level political officials who were in the Casa Rosada last Thursday, and they rounded out the details of the new project.

The basis is what Silvia Lospennato toiled in vain, but it will include one more condition so that a convicted person is inhibited from being a candidate. “Double conformity” – convictions in two instances will not be enough. It will be necessary for all instances to be exhausted. That is, the Supreme Court of Justice. With this, the government believes that it will remove the condition of having a first and last name from this project. Peronism believes that it is an anti-Cristina project.

These pacts have winners and losers. The balkanization of the parties, of which Milei’s presidency is the effect – not the cause – promotes confrontations in each formation. The hottest one for the ruling party is the one that arises from Jorge Macri’s decision to separate the dates of the elections.

This Macri believes that he has to detach himself from any marriage with mileism. He ordered the dates to be separated in disagreement with cousin Mauricio, who is closer to trying to reach an understanding with the government.

Why, Jorge asks, if we already know that they are coming through the City? If they push him, ironically: if we go together, can you imagine the bunker on election day? If last year they ignored us after we made them win, imagine what they wouldn’t do now to degrade us.

His management is the target chosen by Olivos to displace the PRO from the main district he governs, and for that Milei has an objective understanding with Peronism.

Jorge Macri seeks to protect the management by taking refuge in his own date because he knows that If the PRO loses the legislative elections, it will begin to say goodbye to this world. At this point he discovers that Mauricio’s game has other times. He wants to be the Aznar of the PRO, to direct it from Qatar as the godfather of the Creole center-right. He doesn’t see where the business is in being the frontal opposition to Milei.

Jorge, on the other hand, is in the electric chair – as Chacho Álvarez called the Buenos Aires mayor – and everyone’s fate depends on him. This week he went on TV to propose a front space that brings together the PRO, the UCR and the Coalition. That is, a reconstruction of Cambiemos, what Macri destroyed last year. The only way that his destiny could be united with Mauricio’s project is for him to accept his candidacy for national senator this year.

Like everything the government does, this push seeks the benefits of marketing. With the three instances, the Clean Record project becomes testimonial, because the prohibitions on a convicted person from exercising civic rights already appear in the legislation..

They also know that it may have approval in the Deputies, but that in the Senate with 34 votes from Peronism it is difficult for it to prosper. Whether he leaves or not, the government will seek to get rid of the reproach that it delayed it for reasons of state – re-electing Martín Menem – and will fulfill the promise-consolation that Javier Milei made to Lospennato on the day of the session’s failure.

The official speech will insist that Milei fulfills his promise to Peronism, with which he agreed, and to the PRO, which harshly punished the government for this low tactic.

For the government it is another marketing business. Let’s go up, bingo. If he doesn’t come out, he will have arguments to punish the politicians. After all, Milei is a rebound president – due to the defeat of Peronism and Cambiemos – and is in office due to the mechanics of the runoff.

There are yellow signs about the project, which is moving against the clock. This year’s legislative elections are complex due to the validity of the Single Ballot and the electoral justice system has to adapt the system. It costs time and money. Especially when reforms are at stake in an election year, an unrepublican inconsistency. Changes are proposed when the electoral process is already underway. The government falters, but so does the opposition. Axel Kicillof warned that he will decide on STEP and splitting on the edge of the obligation to convene. This tinkering with the system may receive some judicial reproach that further impairs things because the change in the system is already part of the parties’ strategies. An ignoble touch on one of the few systems that works well in Argentina, which is the electoral regime. For the eventual judicial plot of these projects: art. 38° of the Constitution requires parties to guarantee “the representation of minorities, the competition for the nomination of candidates for elective public positions.” How will this mandate be fulfilled without PASO or some system that ensures the “democratic organization and functioning” of the parties, which art. 38°?

With the bonus of this exchange, the government feels confident in calling extraordinary sessions in February. It is not easy because there will be conditions for Congress to meet. First, let the government debate the 2025 budget.

Deputies will take the lead with a revised Clean File and with the suspension/repeal of the PASO. Jorge Macri’s decision to move for the elimination of those primaries in CABA leaves the PRO without many arguments to deny the vote to this initiative sought by the ruling party and Peronism.

Macri also requested it when he was president. Until now he defended them because Together for Change was possible between 2015 and 2021 due to timely use of that candidacy validation system.

Radicalism seems divided because it was able to rearm itself in the same period using the PASO, although it is not a strange system because they have always had internal elections to decide candidates and party authorities. They are the exception compared to other protagonists. National Peronism held its last selection of candidates in 1988. They were so scalded that they never repeated it.

So far Cristina has not said whether or not she supports “the Old Man’s” invention – that is what Máximo called Néstor’s PASO project in 2010. She asked for time until mid-January to mobilize a formal statement from the PJ that she presides over.

It could be his reappearance at a partisan event. The headquarters on Matheu Street is speeding up the works on the second floor where Cristina will have her office according to directives she gave when she visited that headquarters. “I love to build – he once said -, I must be the reincarnation of a great Egyptian architect”.

The Peronist vote is a tool that will seek to value other agreements with the government. Free, nothing. It will be difficult for Milei, the PRO, the UCR and the PJ to appear agreeing to eliminate the PASO.

The call for a statement from the PJ on the PASO subjects Cristina to an examination. The assembly of the new leadership expresses the Peronism of the AMBA and exposes it to the same vulnerabilities that the party had in 2023.

He went to the presidential elections with an AMBA formula, demobilized Peronism from the interior, and lost the elections even though he scored 44 points in the runoff. It is plausible to imagine that, if he had put a strong figure from the interior in Sergio Massa’s formula, and had prevented the Peronist governors of the North from decoupling the date of the local elections from the national ones, Unión por la Patria would have been able to win the elections in the first round.

This is what Massa himself believes when he fights in these hours so that Buenos Aires does not divide the dates of the elections. He understands that it will divide Peronism again, now in the province, and will have the same effect. He is right, Peronism’s competitiveness depends on maintaining unity in the face of an ruling party with all its tribes divided.

The distrust of AMBA’s Peronism is expressed these days by Gildo Insfran, president of the party’s Congress. He maintains to whoever wants to listen to him in his province that it is a mistake for Cristina to have once again concentrated the management of Peronism in the AMBA.

He goes further when he states “Camporism is not Peronism”. As his method is not to play at the national level so as not to risk his power in Formosa, he did not support Ricardo Quintela’s attempt to dispute the PJ with Cristina. But he doesn’t want to be in Matheu’s photo either.

He is moving cautiously after the ruling of the Supreme Court, which declared the system of indefinite re-elections in his province unconstitutional. He is preparing a reform in which he will abide by that ruling, but he will surely do the great Angeloz. He believes that this intervention by the Court is a bad precedent because it violates provincial autonomies.

The new constitution will impose a limitation of two terms, but from now on. He has been in office for seven terms, and if he wins, he will be able to have two more from 2027.. The date of conventional elections is reserved. He awaits the result of the elections for the mayor of Clorinda, the second largest city in the province.

It is to choose the successor of Manuel Celauro, who died last October. According to the result of this test, which will occur on April 13, the date of the constituent elections in Formosa will be decided.