The most relevant intern within the PRO is the one whose protagonists are Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and Patricia Bullrich. Both sides are characterized as hawks and doves. The hawks are the toughest and are represented by Bullrich, and the pigeons are more moderate and line up behind Rodríguez Larreta.
At this time, both compete as candidates for the 2023 presidential elections and have relevant places. Bullrich is president of the PRO at the national level and Rodríguez Larreta holds the position of head of the Buenos Aires Government.
But there is a meeting point, something that unites them, beyond that common presidential goal. It is about a couple that works for both of them. It is the marriage between Julia Pomares and Alberto Föhrig. She is the head of advisers to the Government of the City of Buenos Aires. She works side by side with Rodríguez Larreta in the general strategy of the government and is also the coordinator of the technical teams of the 2023 campaign. He is the main advisor to Patricia Bullrich and also coordinates the presidential campaign of the former Minister of Security. Föhrig’s level of involvement is such that he is one of Bullrich’s companions on his tour of the United States next week, where he will visit companies in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, investors in New York with assets in Argentina, Republican officials and Democrats, in Washington, and will also participate in a seminar with students in Chicago. They will also meet with the Nobel Prize in Economics specialized in Inflation Thomas Sargent.
Love. Pomares and Föhrig met at the Casa Rosada. It was during the government of the alliance, in the office of Federico Storani. She was an adviser to the minister and he was his chief of staff. In other words, they are a couple that was born in the heat of politics. After that experience in public management, both went to study abroad. She to London and he to Oxford, where they did postgraduate studies. Over time they had two children and began to develop their academic life in Buenos Aires. Pomares became executive director of the Center for the Implementation of Public Policies for Equity and Growth (Cippec) and Föhrig deepened her academic training by specializing in security and drug trafficking issues. During the government of Mauricio Macri, Föhrig worked with Patricia Bullrich as Secretary of Planning and Training Coordination and today also participates in the Institute for Strategic Studies in Security, Bullrich’s foundation.
Pomares, among its tasks, has the articulation between the foundations that support the members of Together for Change. They are Pensar (PRO), Alem (UCR), the Hannah Arendt Institute (Civic Coalition) and Federal Meeting (the Peronist PRO). In recent weeks, these think tanks made headlines for different documents they published as the rules of good practice for the 2023 elections, to avoid low blows in the campaign.
Pomares and Föhrig are aware that the PRO internal team converges at home and they assume it naturally. It is the job that they have to do today and they try not to personalize the conflicts, in the end it is all about politics. Even the same protagonists have made jokes about how the discussions will be at home, as if it were a kind of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”, the movie starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
In the United States there was the case of a couple with crossed political interests: it was the marriage between James Carville and Mary Matalin. He advised the Democrats and she the Republicans. Carville is known in Argentina because at the end of the ’90s he was an adviser to Eduardo Duhalde, when he was governor of Buenos Aires.
Today the intern between Larreta and Bullrich is going through a quiet stage, but it remains to be seen if the temperature rises as the definition stage approaches. And we will have to see how that affects the marriage of Pomares and Föhrig.
