Alberto Fernandez He sent her a message as soon as the act was over with Cristina Kirchner in Technopolis. It was the first time they had spoken in three months and the President – in a line that continues to this day – was more than concerned about maintaining the precarious truce with his running mate. That’s why the text he sent to Matias Kulfas, until then his Minister of Production. “Stay calm and don’t answer,” he told her. But he couldn’t convince him. The departure of the official from this Government was already underway.
It was an event that took the entire ruling party by surprise. But, perhaps, who least expected this outcome was Pablo Gonzalez. Perhaps it was because the owner of YPF He arrived more than tired at the 100th anniversary of the Argentine company. You have to understand: he literally had to travel back and forth across the country just to see if he could achieve the miracle of bringing together and making two people talk who had spent 90 days without speaking to each other.
Gonzaleza month ago, visited Fernandez to ask you to attend the event. The presidentShe replied that she thought it was more of a CFK issue -it was during her presidency that the company was nationalized- and that she should be the one to star in it. That is why González undertook an adventure, and traveled to El Calafate just to see if he could convince the vice president. There the situation began to become a tragicomedy, a postcard repeated in this Government. Cristina told him that she did not want to share the stage with the President, an idea that González conveyed to the target when she returned from Santa Cruz.
Alberto, perhaps worried about the institutional vacuum that this emblematic act was going to have, told him that then he would go to occupy the chair. But on Thursday the 2nd, at the last minute, a call surprised the head of YPF. “Pablo, what is Alberto going to do? Is he going to go? Well, then I’m going too”, he would say, from the other end of the phone, CFK. González had achieved what no one had achieved in three months, and that in the middle they had tried to do it by cabinet priests such as the ministers Jorge Ferraresi, Gabriel Katopodis and Juan Zabaleta, all on different occasions. But the reunion, which in the previous one was already imagined spicy, had an even more unexpected outcome.
After a short hand in hand between the two, which lasted just over five minutes before going on stage, Cristina spoke before the country and threw several darts. There was one that was addressed to Kulfas: “You have to sit down with businessmen, but not as friends but asking them to give something back.”
Although those who spoke with the President as soon as the act ended noted that he was more than satisfied with how it turned out and with the fact that he was showing himself in public again with the Vice President, the man had warned that the situation could escalate. “Stay calm, do nothing”, le Alberto said, in a brief WhatsApp message, to Kulfas. But the minister ignored him and dug his own grave.
The departure of Kulfas, a historical Alberto who had an office in Callao when the now ill-fated group with the name of that street was founded, which was the only one to have its own office in the bunker in San Telmo during the elections, and which was the man who most represented the president’s economic thinking was a tsunami within the government.
Kulfas gave an interview as soon as the act of controversy ended, and then approved a message sent off to the press, in which officials from Enarsa, the public company in the energy sector that controls Kirchnerism, were targeted for making a tender ” to measure Techint”. Perhaps in the anger that prompted Kulfas to kick the board was the fact that the tender he had complained about CFK his own troops had been involved.
But the message contained rude technical errors – a fact that caught the attention even of the Kulfas troops, accustomed to working under the rigid demands of the former minister – and, in addition, something more serious: in that off a collusion between the Christianity and Rocca. “You can tell Cristina everything, but accuse her of benefit Rocca, with whom he always got along lousy? It is not knowing her”, explains a vice-presidential sidekick. It was a violation that blew up the precarious truce, which at that time had not yet reached 24 hours, in the air. “And that’s the worst, we can’t sustain the good news for a day,” lamented a national official.
Those who were in Olivos at the start of that Saturday the 4th swear that, in the first few minutes, Alberto wanted to avoid firing his minister. In that attempt there were several -in the ruling party they point to the survivors of Grupo Callao- pressuring the President in this regard, but finally a poisoned tweet from CFK complaining of the “pain” caused by “attacks” of this type dynamited everything for the airs. In the Fifth, howeverassure that an accurate intervention of the all-terrain general secretary, Julius Vitobello, he had already managed to convince Alberto that he had to kick Kulfas out. On Monday the 6th -against the advice given to him that same Saturday by Massa, who, once again, insisted on the idea of creating a productive mega-ministry with one of his men in charge-, the president received in the Rosada to Kulfas, who went with her son. By then the Justice, via complaints from the opposition, had already begun to move (see box). Then the outgoing minister dispatched himself with a long letter that earned him criticism even from those who defended him within the Cabinet. “Leaving a government insulting in public is treasonous,” a concerned minister dispatched.
Of the entire episode, those who know both Alberto as Cristina they were left with an impression. “The debate, and that’s why CFK says about the pen, is because of the way each one understands power,” says a front-line official. The man shares a diagnosis that several of those who speak with the vice also have. “All of this is because she is worried about the finiteness of Central’s reserves, and because if we run out of dollars we end up badly,” he says. The adjudication of the assembly of the pipes will cost the treasury 500 million dollars (200 to make the plates and 300 to transform them into pipes). This is the core of the vice president’s approach: she is afraid that the economic situation will get out of control. She stopped having faith in Guzmán a while ago and thinks that Alberto does not fully understand how serious the situation is. That he doesn’t understand the levers of the economy and that he doesn’t understand power.
