An operator from Patricia Bullrich’s inner circle is sitting in a bar in Palermo. With one hand he holds a glass of soda with lemon and ice, and with the other he draws numbers in the air: 150 dollars went to the last mini tour in Uruguay, he says, and 10 thousand the previous one, to the United States, numbers well below the average of a trip of these characteristics. “It is that we eat the cheapest, we stay with friends and we move in a private car. We don’t take a photographer or a secretary, and Patricia writes her own newsletters. This is what Larreta cannot understandA: He thinks that it is all money, that with money you make and win an election. That is why he could never understand Patricia”, he says. And he ends with a final calculation: with the 30 million dollars that they want to raise for what would be an austere campaign -a national candidate usually spends three times that- it will reach them and have more than enough to carry Bullrich to the Pink House.
A few days after the publication of the video of the fight with Philip Michael that shook the opposition like an earthquake, this is the climate in the Bullrich world: they are counting the days until he sits in Rivadavia’s chair. To this wave of enthusiasm they add, again, arithmetic. They say that, after the initial concern, they measured the reactions to the threats of the president of the PRO to “break the face” of the head of Buenos Aires cabinet. Among the voters of Together for change, those images would have gotten 80 percent endorsement. To former Minister of Security and his people care little that the bulk of the space rejected his manners, that the fact that his team has leaked the material, that the vast majority of the cambiemite mayors and governors support Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, that even Mauricio Macri It seemed to her that she had gone too far, and that she does not have the weapons, the money or the equipment for the challenge of winning a national internship: she is convinced that she has “the personality” that “the people” want. And that her destiny can only take her to one place.
Big Brother. Go to an event with Patricia Bullrich has its complexities. In places like Córdoba, where it has a positive image through the roof, the former montonera comes out more beaten than when she did shooting practice in her grandmother’s field: people jump on her and between the pushes they get bruises and scratches. On city tours and at red circle events, Bullrich always walks as if she were in the telefé fashion reality show. It is wired with a microphone and a camera that never stops recording, follows her wherever she goes, with the idea of later making clips for the networks. Bullrich does politics from dawn to dusk.
The pictures of the fight with Felipe Miguel at the launch of Macr’s latest booki were spread, exclusively, among five people on your team. That happened in the last minutes of Monday, October 24, when those in charge of her communication sat down to download the material. The recording was passed between them just to laugh a little at what they celebrated as a new Bullrich occurrence. “Patricia is like that, they can’t get angry. She even sends us to shit several times a day, it’s frontal, nothing more, ”they explain from that side of the crack.
Seven days later the video was leaked. Not all of it, because in the original version, which lasts a few more seconds, you get to see the candidate about to sit down after threatening her. How did the clip reach the media? Beside Bullrich They do not want to point out the culprit, whom they say they have identified and who they would have separated from the armed forces for his youthful sin. According to this account, it was an unintentional mistake.
But the damage was done and it shook into space. Contrary to what Bullrich says, who believes that the scandal benefited her, some private opposition polls maintain that this fight made them lose three points in the polls to all Together for Change. “It’s just that people are tired of seeing politicians fighting among themselves, we feed them Milei already caste her speech like this. We are going to govern in a year and we have to stop screwing around with these things”, says a shipowner from Buenos Aires. That phrase synthesizes the thought of the vast majority of Together, from pigeons to hawks, including Macri’s entourage.
Several of his inner circle told him to his face that he had exceeded himself, in what was a déjà vú almost copied from the latest bravado of the PRO president: when she criticized Larreta for crossing fences with Cristina, when he refused to repudiate the assassination attempt on the vice president and when he did not want to congratulate Lula on his presidential victory, he received negative opinions even from members of his own team. But she, like the salmon, always chose the least popular direction, even among her own. Several of her critics, however, agree with her with Monday’s newspaper and with the image of the Brazilian posing with the cap of “CFK 2023”. “It is that she is a timer,” they explain.
intimate enemies. To understand the fight with larretism, you must first try to understand Bullrich. She disbelieves in formulas, in Excel, in grand plans, in taking a step back and then taking two steps forward, in negotiations, in give and take, in agreements, in basically everything that is understood as modern politics. For her, Argentina and its sad reality are simply changed with “attitude”, with “courage”, with “personality”. With a bang on the table. An example: a well-known economist tells that he brought a plan to Patricia, but that she interrupted him after a few minutes, when the presentation began to get deep. “But you tell me what I have to do and I do it, it’s not that difficult,” she snapped.
Bullrich likes to compare himself to Winston Churchill. In his vision of history, the Englishman managed to overcome the Second World War thanks to his “courage” and his courage to do what others did not. That is why he also likes to equate Larreta with Neville Chamberlain, the predecessor of the British hero, who went down in history as the prime minister who made Hitler grow thanks to his lukewarmness and lack of confrontation. Hawks and Doves is more than a marketing slogan for Bullrich: it is the philosophy with which he understands the past and the present of humanity itself.
With Miguel there is a history of conflicts. He was the person in charge of the City who liaised with Bullrich when the transfer of the Federal Police to the Buenos Aires orbit occurred, in 2016, to give birth to the City Police. She was Macri’s Minister of Security and there were several frictions, which would later be repeated due to differences on how to face protests on Buenos Aires soil. Bullrich does not respect him, something similar to what happens to him with Larreta. He thinks they “don’t feel politics,” as he likes to say to her.
In this sense, Bullrich differentiates the head of government from Macri, whom she does see as a political animal, different from her but of the same species. With him she had a mutually beneficial relationship that seems to be about to come to an end. He, after the blow of 2019, empowered her as president of the PRO and showed her as her dolphin. She took advantage of her support and – with the convenient excuse of feeling disappointed by the lack of public support for her candidacy in 2021, something that the former president never promised her – now she postulates it as part of the past. She ran out of fine tuning time.
fragile truce. The internal opposition reached an untenable point. In private, and with the recorder turned off, the worst atrocities are said: from Bullrich’s side they accuse Larreta of watering the country with money, of using taxpayer money to set guidelines for everything that moves, of The video was actually filtered by them to attack Patricia -something that others in the same circle deny-, and with various pressures. The rumor of an important Buenos Aires official squeezing a PRO mayor who approached Bullrich, an intimidation that included the promise to take away his alleged funds, is one of the most told stories in recent days in that space.
They are not just statements. When the minister makes tours of the territory, not even she notifies the local cambiemitas who respond to Larreta. Her public support for Jorge Macri as a candidate for the Buenos Aires government, at the end of October in Plaza Houssay, was an action purely and exclusively planned as an evil act to make Larreta lose his temper. And boy did he succeed: in the offices on Uspallata street, the decision of the former mayor and current Buenos Aires minister fell heavy. “It is not understood why Jorge is hurrying. If here he had our full support, ”they say. Several interesting facts emerged from that skirmish. The first is that cousin Jorge’s campaign manager is Fernando de Andreis, Mauricio’s shadow. In Bullrich’s team they say that staying in his evil is seeing only one side of the coin: the proposal of public support for the cousin was sponsored by both. The second piece of information is Larreta’s renewed insistence on his Minister of Health, Fernán Quirós, to be encouraged to make the leap to the candidacy. There is a version that at a dinner at the end of October he sent him to walk the City. What is clear – and this, say those who speak with the former president, has become “an obsession” for him – is that the PRO, with one candidate or another, does not intend to give away the City. The renewed radical hope that Larreta will support them for the Buenos Aires competition -an idea of which Bullrich also accuses him- seems to be an illusion.
Despite Larretista’s style of turning the other cheek, on this side they also hit back: they say that Bullrich lost all the political codes, that she attacks the only management that the PRO has to show – with the aggravating circumstance of being the president of the party -, that she doesn’t care about anything but herself, and that she hurts the whole space, repeating Miguel’s catchphrase that made Bullrich angry. “It is true that this is how Kirchnerism works.”
May the best win? There is only one point on which both sides agree: both assure that their private measurements give their candidate above the other, for which they say they are enthusiastic to compete in an internal one. At this rate it promises to be bloodthirsty, despite the fact that a national shipowner from Larreta bets a barbecue to whoever they want that peace will finally prevail and through an agreement a great shared list will be put together for 2023. “If I lose it will be difficult pay everyone,” he says.
It sounds strange to imagine Bullrich signing peace, despite the fact that, at the breakfast that Macri proposed on Tuesday the 8th among the PRO priests -which had its harsh moments-, she came out aligned and without making bombastic statements. The idea of her competing for the City – an offer that Larreta swears made her in the recent past and that she rudely rejected – seems unlikely. In this sense, she has an advantage over the head of government: she does not control any apparatus and has nothing to lose, and she also has the trouble of her biological clock (she will reach the election at 67) to finish convincing her. “She is the Argentine Meloni. The people today want that”, says Marcelo Peretta, the pharmaceutical unionist who walks the City on behalf of Bullrich. This is Patricia, the leader of discord. She goes all or nothing.
