This 2023 will not remain in the memory of Mauricio Macri like a great year. The former president played a role in the internal Together for Change that wore down the coalition, its candidate lost the general elections, supported Javier Milei but he was unable to translate that influence into positions and, as if that were not enough, he wanted to preside over Boca and He was defeated by Juan Román Riquelme. All wrong.
Not having been able to return to power in Xeneize complicates it on another level: Macri imagined a three-way billiards game. Leveraging the club to maintain political muscle also meant being better positioned for one of his future desires, leading FIFA. Now you will have to wait. While, he settles in to once again be the boss of the PRO, his own party that until now was led by Patricia Bullrich. She will be his consolation in 2024. And his platform so as not to be completely politically isolated.
Monkey.
To a year where things had not gone according to Macri’s request, an unhappy ending was added. After running a strong campaign to manage Boca again, Riquelme won the elections forcefully: he doubled his votes and left him empty-handed. As usually happens, everything ended up becoming politicized: that is also why the club elections ended with Macrista frustration and K celebration.
But what will cost Macri the most is having provoked the first strong anger of Javier Milei. Mauricio invited him to take a chance on his project and the new President came in: he got involved in the campaign, gave his opinion and on Sunday the 17th, while a part of the country was doing damage control due to a strong storm, he went to La Bombonera to vote. . He received his first public boo.
Milei took his anger to the “engineer,” as he calls him. The thing is that she had left it exposed while Macri was traveling. The thing is that, incredibly, the vice candidate who wanted to unseat Riquelme did not go to vote for himself: He was in Saudi Arabia watching the Club World Cup, in his role as Executive President of the FIFA Foundation.
The only thing he managed to do, 13 thousand kilometers away, was send a tweet protesting the booing of Milei: “What a shame to see images of men who claim to be Boca fans, when in reality they are tremendously rude and not spontaneous, insulting to the President of the Republic instead of celebrating that he is going to vote for the future of our beloved club,” he wrote. The president did not think it was enough.
After the defeat, the former president of Boca issued a statement protesting Riquelme’s ways and giving him advice to change his way of leading Xeneize. ANDyes, at no time did he congratulate him on the victory. “It will be very difficult for us to become one of the 5 big clubs in world football again,” he said.
But what Macri really regrets is that the defeat alters his plans. It distances him from FIFA and reduces his political influence. What happened to the former president is the closest thing to exile. He will have to find another springboard to jump back into politics. The thing is that he also couldn’t sneak his team into a Milei cabinet that was missing many names.
Neither the presence of Luis “Toto” Caputo nor that of Patricia Bullrich are Macri’s moves. The only request he had made to Milei was that Cristian Ritondo preside over the Chamber of Deputies, but the president ignored him: he chose Martín Menem.
He found out about the proposal that Caputo be the Minister of Economy on the fly. Although they have a good relationship with his former official, it was not because of his personal request that “Toto” ended up in Milei’s cabinet. As for Bullrich, his decision to join the Ministry of Economy ended up breaking a relationship that had been going awry: The former president accuses her of having cut herself.
Bullrich, in return, left him offside. In one of his last public appearances, in a talk at the Libertad Foundation in Rosario, he confirmed a different version about the Olivos Pact, which NOTICIAS had advanced, but which Macrismo was in charge of distorting. She said that it was she, not Mauricio, who devised the informal coalition with La Libertad Avanza. “I’m going to make a confession to you. I left the night after losing and couldn’t sleep. The change situation was complex because Massa was bigger, he was three points away from winning in the first round,” he said.
The Minister of Security explained: “Massa was going to achieve the dream of Peronism of creating a single party in Argentina, like the PRI in Mexico, because he was going to go for the center, the right, the middle. He was going to eat everything. I went to sleep at 6 in the morning convinced.” And she concluded: “I went and told Mauricio that we had to support Javier Milei and he answered: ‘How quickly they made the decision.’” And they moved forward.
The plan.
After a 2023 to be forgotten, Macri had to make a new projection for 2024. He will once again take the reins of the PRO, which Bullrich had to let go to enter Milei’s cabinet. And he will try, from the party that he founded two decades ago, to maintain his prominence in a year where there will be no elections.
To do this, in mid-December he gathered the troops in his office in Vicente López, and agreed to “responsible support” for Milei. That is, analyze in the chambers “law by law”, beyond coinciding with the need for adjustment.
Upon announcing that he was joining Milei’s cabinet, The Minister of Security called party elections for February, but the PRO wants to extend the date: it will not be appropriate to discuss the internal one in the summer, while the country adjusts to the strong libertarian measures. The former president is in no hurry. He knows that when the time comes, no one will be able to oppose him, the creator of space.
What he won’t have around him is any important figures: in addition to Bullrich, The departure of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta is noticeable, who, despite having been defeated in the PASO, still dreams of being president. It will seek to be reborn politically with a broader force than the Macri space.
There are many leaders of Together for Change who blame Macri for the defeat in the elections. They accuse him of having flirted for too long with his own candidacy and, then, of having fueled the internal dispute between Bullrich and Larreta which ended up wearing down the coalition and making Milei grow.
He did something similar in Boca: Until the last moment he did not clarify whether or not he would be a candidate. Finally he accompanied Andrés Ibarra in the formula. There was everything: the election ended up being judicialized and politicized. But the result was, once again, a setback.
2023 was a constant storm and Macri was full of leaks. Taking refuge in the PRO, he will try to rearm himself for what is coming. He wants to change the streak: if there is something that is difficult for the former president, it is accepting defeats.
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