Juliana Awada he released him in the middle of the party: “Look what Mauritius (Macri) he will not be a candidate next year.”
If there is something in which the former president’s partner is an expert, it is in the social conventions of the world in which he moves, he perfectly understands the labels and codes of the red circle. So, dropping that news on the head table at the wedding of Jorge Lanata -in which, in addition to the journalist’s new wife and daughters, was also the musician “Chano” CarpentieR- It was not accidental at all. But if any of those present believed that the phrase was a declaration of the former first ladyI was wrong.
macriA while later, when the drinks had already begun to flow, he took Lanata to a corner. “Jorge, what Juliana said is true, I’m not going to compete,” she assured him. From the wedding to the closing of this magazine not even a week passed, but there is no one in the opposition who does not wonder how sincere the founder of the PRO was during that party. It is more than a doubt: the game of the opposition leader is a ghost that today runs through all of Cambiemos, that scares some and gives hope to others. Two years after leaving power, and leaving behind a broken country, Macri returned to the center of the ring.
Revolving door
That the former president has ambitions is nothing new. He raised a party from scratch, and with it he won the elections in 2015. That any bishop aspires to be Pope is not new in Argentine politics either. And it is also known that Macri wrote his government memoirs and He titled them “First Time”in clear reference to the fact that he feels that he still has to play the second.
What is striking is the resurrection of the former president. After what was his government, which ended with a stagnant economy and a gigantic debt, the majority of the red circle -among them, the competitive candidates of Together for Change- considered him buried, an analysis that sometimes mixed the reading politics with personal desires. But that reality changed. Macri’s circle even has the date from when history began to show another face: in that world they trace the growth of the actions of the founder of the PRO to the second half of 2021, after the electoral blow of the ruling party. And in recent weeks that idea gained strength.
There are several, in fact, who are convinced that Macri not only could be a competitive candidate, but that he has to be. That it has to be his last name that is on the list of Together for the Change of 2023. Miguél Ángel Pichettowho knew how to be a running mate, told him without hesitation and to his face.
It was in a meeting they held in the offices of Macri in Vicente Lopez, a few blocks from the presidential Fifth to which the former senator aspires to send him to live. The Auditor General of the Nation went there with Ramón Puerta, a former ambassador of Spain and an old acquaintance of both, with only one idea in mind: to convince him to run as a candidate for The presidency. Macri was days away from traveling to the United States and I had a tight schedule, but despite that the meeting lasted a long time. The advantages and disadvantages of that idea were discussed, and a short list of possible companions was even discussed: repeating the 2019 formula (“I do what the boss says,” was the convenient response from Pichetto, who still has the desire to reach the second position of the Executive) or, as Jaime Durán Barba would recommend, opt for a female and young vice president. That’s where the senator hit the nail on the head Carolina Losada, one of the revelations of last year’s elections, in what would also be a nod to radicalism, the former journalist’s party. Although it was an informal talk, of the many that happen every day within the red circle and that often do not end in anything, Pichetto and Puerta left with a firm idea: Macri wants -and many- to be a candidate.
What, then, has changed in recent times? That the former president thinks he has a chance, an idea that he also maintains with the fact that the numbers in the polls are punishing him less than in other times and that the government that succeeded him is not on the ball. And this inflates his chest and gives him security when it comes to moving, when speaking in public, when claiming Menem or posing for a photo with Donald Trump – in which he surprised himself by showing himself next to a glass of beer with orange, he who never liked alcohol very much-, when it comes to doing politics within Together for Change. It is a matter of attitude, although it does not stop there.
Is that, or at least this is what those who speak daily with Macri swear, it is not only Pichetto who makes the pilgrimage to Vicente López to ask him to run. “Many of the red circle are going to see it, I don’t know if they are disappointed with Larreta or worried about Milei, but the same guys who filed him during his government and retired him a year ago now tell him that he has to present himself, ”says someone from his kidney. According to what they say there, they are not just promises to the wind: they say that several businessmen, popes from the private world, are offering him financing for his future campaign. “There is nothing concrete, except for the fact that Mauricio loves having recovered the centrality and the expectation, he is happy”, they admit in his circle.
Locked cat
In the environment of Macri they lower the smoke to the affirmations that monopolized the political week, since the journalist Carlos Pagni assured in his program in La Nación+ that the protagonist of this cover had already decided to compete and that he had even communicated it to his family. “In politics there are no impossible things, but Mauricio today does not have his head in candidacies, he is very happy with his role of contributing to unity and with proposing substantive ideas, as he did with Airlines,” they say near him, where they have that the former president is more focused on what could be called a plan. “Why do we come back”, is the idea that he repeats, where he breaks down these longer-term measures.
In fact, speculations are woven in the macrista circle about the rumors that crossed the red circle. “I don’t know who makes him run but he is not interested in advancing the discussion, there is nothing to gain and much to lose. If in March 2023 his ceiling goes up, it could be, but why define now? It only serves to annoy the allies ”, they say very close to him, and remember that Macri chose not to appear in 2011, when he devastated a recently widowed Cristina Kirchner, and who also fled the alliance with Sergio Massa in 2015. “He is a timekeeper, and declaring himself a candidate now is exactly the opposite of that, it makes no sense. It is the others who make him a candidate”, they swear.
Beyond the fact that the personal intentions of anyone – and this includes presidents and former leaders – are subject to the passage of time and the context, and that a life is missing for the elections, the entire episode left some clear conclusions.
In Together for Change caused a tsunami, especially within the PRO. those who know Patricia Bullrich They say that she has been losing patience with Macri for a while. “She was convinced that Mauricio was going to promote her, and in 2021 she let go of his hand and now she appears with this,” they say in those corridors. They also give a personal anecdote: a couple of days after the president of the PRO announced a marketing trip to the United States, Macri was photographed with Trump and that image, which went viral, “covered” the other news . Those who spoke with the former Security Minister say that she was more than furious with the situation, and that she even suspected that she went on purpose. “Mauricio has known Trump since he was 20 years old and they were both, by chance, in the same city. They are confident to the level that they fixed the meeting on WhatsApp. There was no Machiavellian plan,” they say about the former president.
Beyond the intersections, there is a political analysis that is clear to all the actors: Macri’s growth necessarily goes over the figure of Bullrich. They will be able to imitate the larger falcon but never equal it, it would be logical. It is a hard reality to accept for the former minister, who had already put on the suit of a presidential candidate. Perhaps that is why, they admit from both sides, it is happening an approach between her and Larreta, that for now does not go beyond formalisms but that in the future could be a novelty. You have to go to the mill where there is water.
The head of the Buenos Aires Government is also closely following the situation. On Wednesday the 27th, at the height of the theme of the week, he received Macri at a Cabinet meeting at government headquarters. The former president listened for more than an hour to the executive proposals of Larretismo for the remainder of that administration, and he spoke for a few minutes about the end. “People are looking for new things and we are not so new anymore, but we are different. We must try to continue showing ourselves different so that they do not confuse us with what the old represents, ”he said. The bottom line, however, was about this week’s rumors. Near Larreta they do not hesitate: “Horacio doesn’t get off or crazy. If Mauricio wants to present himself, he is within his rights, but he is going to have to go to an internal one and I do not see him counting vote by vote throughout the country”.
That possible STEPeither against Larreta or against another of Together for Change, is today the great cuckoo within the opposition. Emilio Monzo, who is convinced that Macri is going to be a candidate, assures that within the internal the former president would win without a doubt – he would get more than 30 percent, he says -, as sure as that in the general elections he would lose easily. In larretismo they put an example of his firepower: in 2021 the candidates he supported in Cordoba and Santa Fe they lost pretty bad. And they remember that he had also been against PASO in Buenos Aires and in Capital, and that in the end it ended up bearing fruit. “There is a lot of media smoke about installing it, and also about the fact that they are already financing the campaign. In Argentina there are 10 or 15 businessmen with that wallet and none now, after a year and a half, is going to give money to someone who has no territory”, they say. Durán Barba, architect of the Macrista presidency, is not so sure. “He’s very competitive,” he says.
Airplane mode
Those who speak with Macri say that, beyond the polls and the talk, it is he and only he who is going to decide on his future. “At most, Juliana will give her opinion,” they say. They give an example. “Mauricio doesn’t say anything, but it bothers him a lot when they tell him that he has to be the candidate, and it also bothers him a lot when they want to retire him. He unnerves him. But the truth is that today he does not feel like a candidate, he went through that chair and knows that it is a shredder, ”says a man in daily dialogue with the former president.
But there’s a long way to go and anything can happen although the possibility of an alliance with Javier Milei, with whom Macri flirted, Today it seems almost impossible. Meanwhile, the founder of the PRO is about to release a new book on the history of his ancestors, and plans a year full of courses and trips around the world. Says a former official who is today in his inner circle: “This is a long game, but it’s like we said in the ‘yes we can’ marches: there’s a cat for a while.”
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