“Anatomy of an instant” is a book by Javier Cercas, published in 2009. There the Spanish writer – very famous in Argentina for, among other things, the last work he did on Francisco’s trip to Mongolia – dismantles in detail what happened in the Spanish Congress on February 23, 1981, when military groups tried to carry out a coup d’état against the transitional government of Adolfo Suárez. The entire book is literally written around that fact: Cercas manages to explain all that turbulent time, the recent past of the Franco dictatorship and the challenges of the newborn democracy based on what happens in that “instant” in which the troops enter the premises.
Bridging the gap, the same logic could be applied to what happened in another Congress, the Argentine one. The moment of the Government, the meteoric phenomenon that brought Milei to power and the confusion that the opposition is still going through, could begin to be understood from the arrival of the Chief of Staff to the premises. Manuel Adorni’s show in Parliament shows much more than meets the eye. It is not only a desperate struggle to change the agenda of the economic crisis and the scandals due to possible illicit enrichment of the once star spokesperson – which is added to several cases of corruption in this Government – but it also exposes to the core the frailties of the Government and, together with it, those of an entire era.
Exam
All ministers were obliged by Karina Milei to attend the venue on Wednesday, April 29. It was the latest in an already long history of public support for the Chief of Staff, since the scandal broke out on March 8 after his wife joined the official delegation to the United States. The presence of all officials in the Congress boxes – except for Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno, absent with notice due to a trip – encouraging and celebrating every antics of the former spokesperson is explained for one reason only: the fear generated by the figure of Karina Milei, who has already displaced Santiago Caputo – whom she continues to point out as the culprit of the “operations” to “dirty Manuel” – from the helm of the administration and hopes to end this crisis to end the cupping It is quite a postcard of the time: strategists who perceived themselves as the reinventors of gunpowder, mesadineristas who risked millions of dollars a day and reinvented lots like Buenos Aires’ Bolsonaro have to dance to the beat of the music indicated by someone who until recently was fighting to make ends meet between what she did as a tarot reader and an online seller of homemade cakes.
The person who directs the country’s destinies also enters into this situation. The postcard of the President shouting from the balcony of the venue to any deputy, even to some who are unknown to public opinion, shows the extent to which Karina Milei’s decision to support Adorni against all odds got the entire libertarian administration into mud. This imposition of the general secretary brings unexpected consequences: during one of the intervals the president insulted the entire press – “they are squirts, corrupt” – while he left walking in a hurry, a scene that exposed the president’s bad personal moment.
As this medium reported in its latest edition, the libertarian spends more and more time locked up in the Quinta de Olivos, receives few people, has little contact even with his closest officials and is increasing the daily time he dedicates to social networks, up to three hours per day on average, at the same time that his impact in the virtual world is clearly declining. It is the world upside down: the President serves as the public defender of the Chief of Staff, and in that public support he leaves behind traces of his own image. Perhaps this is why presidential loneliness and his turbulent personality are reaching historic levels. The president’s paranoia reached the level that scares even libertarian leaders. A phrase that he repeats both in private and in public and that causes astonishment is “there is no economic crisis, that is an invention of corrupt journalism.”
The implosion of the Government, driven by the paralysis into which the management entered due to the Adorni case, the fear that Karina generates after the decrease in Caputo’s power and the windmills that Milei fights against, is accelerated. This whole combo means that the libertarian base itself is hit: not only is this decline evident in all the polls, but one of the president’s last public appearances left an unpublished postcard. On the night before the chief of staff’s show in Congress, Milei gave a talk about Keynes at the Palacio Libertad alongside economist Juan Carlos de Pablo. In the middle of the speech, a young follower of hers approached and without warning began to ask her to “listen to the militancy”, a request that was born on social networks and that alludes to the continuous displacement of the libertarian wing against the old recycled politicians that inhabit Karina’s space. Milei simply told the young man that “it was not the time” for that conversation.
In that sense, the Adorni scandal serves as a stopper, since the centrality of public and internal attention to the chief of staff’s misadventures takes the entire brand. At this point there is one of the few coincidences between the two warring sides of the Government: if the official were forced to leave his position, it would cause such an internal quake that it would be accompanied by more changes, in particular with the place occupied by the strategist for now, at a time when the Government is bankrupt and when differences and tensions are even beginning to emerge between “Toto” Caputo and the sister (see box). “If one goes, the other goes,” is a phrase that is repeated from both sides of the Rio Grande, in reference to Adorni and the strategist. Behind the closed defense of the official in Congress is the logic of all those involved: they know that much more is at stake than the personal fate of the former tweeter.
Exposed
With the case of Adorni, the phrase “tell me what you boast about and I will tell you what you lack” could well be used. The fact is that several plots are hidden in the exaggerated support for the Chief of Staff. The most compelling is that the official’s scandal is far from being the only suspected case of corruption in this Government: to the loans for Banco Nación officials, the alleged overcharges in the area of disability, $Libra and the alleged returns in PAMI and ANSES are being added to those of not so well-known officials, such as Andrés Vázquez of ARCA and Carlos Frugoni, an official of Luis Caputo (see box). There are those in the red circle who think that behind the decision not to release Adorni is the logic of preventing, without him in the foreground, public attention from going to thornier issues such as the possible illicit enrichment of the general secretary or the painful course of the Argentine economy. “I’m not going to resign, I came here to show my face,” Adorni launched provocatively in Congress.
So, the Government that came to put an end to the vices of caste embraces Adorni to exaggerate a purity that in no case does it seem to have. Meanwhile, suspicions about the Chief of Staff and the numbers that do not close to him continue to accumulate. For two months now, every day more operations have been discovered that seem difficult to justify with a salary that, until January of this year, was less than three million pesos: vacations in Aruba, at Llao Llao in Bariloche, in Punta del Este and in Rio de Janeiro with his family (in addition to a trip by his wife to Spain in September 2025 in which cash expenses of US$ 6,000 were recorded), the purchase of a charming apartment in Caballito -plus its renovation with new furniture- and a country house in Indio Cúa, and million-dollar monthly card expenses. As if that were not enough, not only politics sniffs that the strength of the Government is no longer what it was: Justice moves at a frenetic pace, like it never had during this administration, and the continuous news about the case that filters from the office of Judge Ariel Lijo feeds all the ghosts. Part of Karina Milei’s suspicions that behind the survival of the scandal in the media is her internal archenemy and they have to do with the fact that the court from which they leave is the same one whom Santiago Caputo wanted for the Court
Supreme
It matters little if this is true: the fact that the actors involved believe it is more than enough to continue promoting the climate of internal destruction.
At this crossroads the Government was trapped, and was left without its main media sword. Since the case broke out, Adorni only gave two articles – in A24 and with Majul – in which, in addition to leaving for history his phrase about “losing his heart,” he looked like a liar when he assured that the trip to New York was the first getaway since he had come into office – and a failed press conference, the prelude to the closing of that room of journalists in the Casa Rosada. None of all these splinters seem to affect Karina Milei. Those who speak with her understand that the general secretary took the fact that they want to displace her protégé almost as a personal affront, and she flatly refuses to give in. “They are not going to tell me what to do, neither the journalism nor the opposition,” she was heard saying. It may be a way of seeing the glass half full, since otherwise you should realize that you do not have many options to replace them and that the one who did make considerable progress in the midst of this storm is Patricia Bullrich (see box) who is distrustful. Adorni became a leading lifeguard of this administration.
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