Milei and her first days under fire

Luis Caputo, the minister accustomed to directing Javier Milei’s chainsaw, had a outbreak of realism and political understanding in front of an important business forum. When speaking at the Latam Economic Forum he confessed to those present: “Votes are not enough. “They have to support us.”

The head of the Economy seemed, in this way, to be honest about a difficulty that the Government is beginning to notice when it reaches its sixth month of office. That 56% of the runoff served as a great initial push, it pulverized the opposition, left the political map in permanent reset, it remains with the imaginary drawing of popular expectation. But it is not enough to carry out the radical transformations that the President proposes.. At that point, public opinion (citizens) delegates its will to institutional representatives. The system. In that terrain, La Libertad Avanza finds itself disoriented.

Society, with successive votes, built a highly complex machinery that must be managed by a leader born as an expression of the anti-system. Someone who in the last few hours compared himself to Terminator (American science fiction film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) and revealed that he is destroying the State “from within.”

That machinery provided him with a third of support in the PASO. A little less in the October general elections when the current Congress was designed. It attracted only 38 deputies and 7 senators. The flood was recorded in the runoff that allowed him to draw the figure of an individually extravagant and very powerful leader. Conditions that he, without a doubt, preserves and expands throughout the world.

Such a contour, however, could start to play against you. Milei managed to corner the opposition for a long time with recurring disqualifications. Without paying attention to nuances. She also did not know how to take care of the group of her own. The block of Deputies split after the failure of the Omnibus Law. In the Senate it already has two representatives who announced that They will not validate Ariel Lijo’s document for the Supreme Court. The libertarian blocks of both Chambers in Buenos Aires also broke. It is worth remembering that it does not have any governor of the 24 existing ones.

When he predicts that in the 2025 elections he will obtain an overwhelming victory, he does not notice one detail: the renewals in the Deputies and Senate are carried out in halves and thirds, respectively. You can improve your present with a good choice. Improbably according to its own majority. Again the pitfall of the system.

The anger that the President revealed when a politically heterogeneous opposition majority in Deputies approved a compensation formula for retirees for the omitted January inflation (8%) could have had multiple components. The first: a mixture of helplessness and the challenge to his authority. The second: the risk, in his opinion, for the fiscal balance that has achieved through a draconian adjustment. This is the axis, for now, of his entire management. The third: the impact on the markets and on the supervision of that goal by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The fourth: its apparent distance from a social segment, retirees, on whom the net 33% of the global adjustment has been falling.

The Government has arrived at this uncomfortable station, above all, due to a display of political incompetence. He had a way out on the table when in January, once the fiscal package was split from the Omnibus Law, two PRO leaders approached Milei with a compensatory equation for retirees that preserved the fiscal balance. At that juncture two things happened. The libertarian leader had the conviction that with the power of his votes he could do anything. He opted for a decree. The first mistrust with Mauricio Macri’s PRO also had an impact. Different for Milei from what Patricia Bullrich, his Security Minister, would represent. Those intrigues remain intact to this day. Above all, after what happened in the session of Deputies. 17 absences were recorded, seven of them corresponding to the PRO. Some of the cases caught our attention: María Eugenia Vidal, the former governor of Buenos Aires, made a strong plea for fiscal defense. She was not present at the time of the vote.

The IMF remains very attentive to all Argentine incidents. He is his biggest creditor. He asked to take care of the fiscal objectives that the Government achieved with “wide margins.” He stressed, again, the need to focus social assistance on the “most vulnerable sectors” and avoid the burden of adjustment on “working families.” He repeated that it remains essential “to work to expand political support for macroeconomic stabilization and reform.”

Will it be possible to achieve this with the new broadside that Milei launched against Congress? He stated that he is willing to veto any rule approved by what he calls “fiscal degenerates.” He has his constitutional authority, as Cristina Fernández had in 2010 when she overturned the 82% mobile penalty for retirees. She did so in defense of the preservation of public accounts during an event that Néstor Kirchner observed from the audience. He did not have in sight the danger that Milei could face: the feasible two-thirds of the Deputies and the Senate, which would ratify compensation for retirees and open a dramatic conflict of powers.

In his last offensive against the parliamentarians, the President took some precautions. He maintained that the majority had fallen into an alleged trap set by Máximo Kirchner. Neither radicalism, nor the Civic Coalition nor the Hacemos Federal Coalition found the circumstantial and toxic alliance with Kirchnerism easy. Mainly responsible for the breakdown of the pension system. But Unión por la Patria had to keep its own expensive project to adjust to the one presented by those fronts.

Guillermo Francos, the Minister of the Interior, knows what a terminal divorce with “the caste” would be about in this instance. He met with governors (Chubut, Neuquén, Tucumán), to whom he promised the resumption of public works in their provinces. He spoke with heads of related blocs in the Senate aiming at an exclusive target. The approval in the upper house of the Base Law and the fiscal package. The numbers are still tight despite the collection of votes that Victoria Villarruel rehearses, the vice president. The step would be essential to attempt a detente between Milei and Congress before retirement compensation can continue its itinerary.

The basis of those imbalances would have roots similar to those that can be detected in almost all areas of Government. Ignorance of politics, management deficit and countermoves that often originate in internal conflicts that surround the ruling party.. These components have generated a schism in the Ministry of Human Capital led by Sandra Pettovello. Designed with some sudden inspiration from Frankenstein.

The minister will temporarily continue in that position while the structure is rethought. She has stayed despite the crisis for two reasons. Milei’s express order. The support that Karina, El Jefe, publicly gave her, with whom she was estranged. They had crossed paths in several discussions. It was a request that the President made to his sister to try to coagulate the bleeding.

It is true that Pettovello faces the largest active focus of the intransigent opposition. The social movements and picketers whom he denounced for multimillion-dollar fraud in the use of state funds. The social plans. It is difficult to understand how he managed to transform that crusade into a boomerang against his administration. She questions it herself and cries. At the moment she can’t give up.

He knows that his ministry is pierced. Although he trusts the services that Camporista lawyer Leila Gianni provides at his side. From within Human Capital, the information that made possible the complaint by social leader K, Juan Grabois, about food stored and undistributed in two state warehouses emerged in detail.

Another lawsuit was opened there poorly managed. Judge Sebastián Casanello ordered the Government to develop a plan for the immediate distribution of food. Gianni and spokesman Manuel Adorni argued that it was an interference in public policies. The ruling was appealed. The Federal Chamber ratified the magistrate’s resolution. It was unanimous and incinerated the first libertarian resistance that believed they discovered a black Kirchnerist hand. That court is made up of Roberto Boico and Eduardo Farah. Also Martín Irurzun, publicly reviled many times by Cristina and Alberto Fernández.

Pettovello instructed to distribute the food and complied with the route sheet that Casanello demanded. He blamed the Secretary of Children, Adolescents and Family, Pablo de la Torre, for the errors. He also denounced him for alleged anomalies in the hiring of outsourced employees. The shock wave reached the Ministry of Education, where four officials linked to the former secretary resigned. In six months, 38 employees left Human Capital.

Management problems are not exclusive to Human Capital. Added to the political inharmony, they have made Milei debut with its first days under fire. This is the governance that the IMF insists on. The Government accused the opposition for the shaking of the markets. He emphasized the destabilizing factor that retirement compensation would have for the fiscal program.

Argentine distrust in the world comes from much further away and responds to countless reasons. There will be no easy peace, not even due to the emergence of a leader who is presumed providential.