Manuel Adorni’s interview with José del Río on LN+ did not close any scandal. What he did was open a new one, more serious than the previous one, because this time the contradictions came from the Chief of Staff’s own mouth. And what followed in the following hours was a crescendo of voices that, from the most varied political spaces, agreed on a diagnosis: Adorni cannot continue.
The first to set the tone was the block that responds to Juan Schiaretti. Senator Alejandra Vigo and deputies Ignacio García Aresca, Juan Schiaretti, Carlos Gutiérrez, Alejandra Torres, Juan Brügge and Carolina Basualdo signed a statement without euphemisms: “Manuel Adorni cannot continue being Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers. The national government cannot continue supporting the lie for even one more day. Adorni lied to the Argentine people and lied before the National Congress.” The text concludes with “Enough of covering up and endorsing lies” that sounds like a political epitaph.
But the claim did not come only from the Peronist opposition. Vice President Victoria Villarruel defined Adorni’s actions and his explanations as “a shame”, and went even further: she publicly reminded him that Article 101 of the Constitution obliges the Chief of Staff to appear before Congress at least once a month, an obligation that Adorni has not fulfilled since November 2025. Villarruel called a Parliamentary Labor meeting to demand his presence in June, in open contradiction with Adorni’s own announcement, who said he would go to the Senate only in July.
From the PRO, the president of the block in the Senate, Martín Goerling Lara, maintained that “Adorni never came to be held accountable” and demanded that the presentation take place during June. Senator Patricia Bullrich, who had requested that Adorni present the sworn statement “immediately”, received the news with a qualification that was not benevolent either: she called what happened “an ethical omission”, a phrase that in the political code is equivalent to saying that the official lied without actually uttering that word.
In the Chamber of Deputies, different opposition blocks requested the president of the body, Martín Menem, to call a special session for June 23 at 2 p.m., with the aim of debating interpellation projects and a motion of censure against the coordinating minister. The note was signed by Germán Martínez, from Unión por la Patria; Esteban Paulón and Pablo Juliano, from United Provinces; Carlos Gutierrez; Marcela Pagano; and the deputies of the Left Front Nicolás del Caño and Romina del Plá.
Pagano deserves a separate mention: it was she who filed the original complaint that triggered the case for illicit enrichment that is currently being processed before Judge Ariel Lijo. When Adorni stood before the deputies in April and said “I am not going to resign,” he did so in the chamber with Milei, Karina and the entire cabinet in the audience. In the Senate it will not have that coverage: the president is Villarruel, who has already made it clear that he does not believe his version.
Friendly fire is not only institutional. Nicolás Márquez, official biographer of the president and a man of Milei’s extreme confidence, described Adorni as a “public mythomaniac” and pointed out that ministers should demand his resignation as a matter of institutional dignity. “His permanence is not doing the Government any good, regardless of whether he is guilty or not of what he is accused of,” Márquez added in subsequent statements. That the man who wrote the official biography of the President asks for the head of the Chief of Staff is a fact that does not allow for benign readings.
The map of the claim is, at this point, almost easier to delimit by its absences than by its presences: basically, only Milei, Karina and the most closed core of Karinism support Adorni without fissures. Everything else—Peronist opposition, Córdoba bloc, PRO, critical UCR, left, the vice president, the President’s own biographer—requests, with different degrees of urgency and different words, the same thing: that the Chief of Staff step aside.
Adorni, for now, does not give it. And Milei holds him. But the chorus is already too big to pretend not to be heard.
by RN
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