President Javier Milei He traveled to Norway this weekend to attend the ceremony to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the Venezuelan opposition leader. Corina Machado. Simultaneously, the vice president Victoria Villarruel He is outside the country on an official visit to Spain. The second in line of succession is participating in the XII Ibero-American Parliamentary Forum held in the Congress of Deputies, where she took the opportunity to claim sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands.
The concurrent absence of both leaders immediately activated the succession mechanism provided for in the National Constitution, appointing the Provisional President of the SenateBartolome Abdalathird in the line of succession, as in charge of the Executive Branch as of this Monday. A fact that occurs within the framework of the well-known internal dispute that divides the main leaders of La Libertad Avanza. It is estimated that the senator from San Luis will remain in executive functions until at least Thursday, the day the president is expected to return to Argentina.
“Given the international commitments of President Javier Milei and Vice President Victoria Villarruel, I have the honor of being in charge of the Executive Branch,” the Puntano senator tweeted on his X account and added: “It is an immense pride for me to assume this historic responsibility.” In the same message, I add the following hashtag: #Te QuieroSanLuis #Te QuieroArgentina”.
Abdala is a public accountant and since December 2023 he has served as national senator for San Luis; That same month he was elected provisional president of the Senate, a position that placed him in the line of presidential succession and gave him national visibility. His political origins place him in areas close to Peronism in San Luis, where he was Minister of Tourism during the Rodríguez Saá administration, then he decided to jump ship and join Macrismo, presiding over the Puntana branch of the PRO, before moving to the libertarian space.
His approach to La Libertad Avanza (LLA) was gradual and pragmatic: Abdala left the PRO in 2021 and, as he himself said in interviews and reports, he joined Javier Milei’s space because “I think Javier is the one who best represents the ideas of freedom that Mauricio Macri himself had at the beginning of his political career and that later, when he was in government, he did not know or could apply. That is why I convinced myself to accompany him.”
In the new national scenario Abdala combined provincial experience and armed capacity. Within the internal LLA, marked by tensions between President Javier Milei and Vice President Victoria Villarruel, the legislator positioned himself as an actor of institutional balance. His election as provisional president of the Senate was, in part, the result of negotiations that involved different operators and he himself publicly relativized the depth of the conflict between the presidential duo by emphasizing that “within a political space you have different ideas” and that these differences do not necessarily break the coalition.
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