The most voted candidate in the country is many things. It depends, nothing more, on what glass you look at it with. For some it causes an almost physical panic, others -the priests of the rival campaigns- prefer not to name it because they no longer know what to do to steal a vote, and for many, for 30 percent of Argentina, it is the hope of a future better.
For Mauricio Macri it is none of those things. It is, just, “Javier”. This is what he tells him, colloquially, every time they speak, as they did in the early hours of Monday the 13th, hours after the polls ruled that he had been the libertarian first in the STEP. “Thank you, engineer,” returned the economist, who treats him with a bow that borders on cholulismo. However, this back and forth between them -which so far this year has resulted in three long virtual conversations and one face-to-face that they prefer not to count- is not what has the entire coalition on edge, but their compliments public towards Milei. While the former president is having fun in Morocco in a bridge tournament, an important part of Together for Change wonders what game Macri is really playing. How far can the cat test the lion?
splinters.
On the day of the elections, some were already making mea culpa in the opposition bunker. They said that Macri had arrived -after 9:00 p.m., accompanied only by his youngest daughter-predisposed to accept the instructions to follow. And that the mistake was, precisely, telling the founder of the PRO that he should do what he wanted once it was his turn to speak.
It is that those who know the former president the most say that it is in that curve, in the struggle between his conscious and unconscious, where the unexpected can happen. And that was exactly what happened when the man in question took the stage, after conveniently covering Horacio Rodríguez Larreta. He happened something that was not in anyone’s plans: he threw flowers at the libertarian, who had just won the election.
“Adding up what Milei brought out plus us, it is a huge majority of Argentines who are proposing a profound change that has not existed in decades in Argentina,” he said in his speech, something that he later rectified in a tweet from his account. That unexpected declaration reactivated a latent malaise for a long time and, moreover, at the worst moment: just when Patricia Bullrich has to reshape her campaign to aspire to a good result in October.
After that public pampering by Macri, Troy burned. And Milei, who since the elections has been striving to show a restraint that clashes with her own biography and psychology, played a clever card that further increased the tension. She went through the television channels speaking wonders of Macri, and offering him a position of “super
ambassador” of an eventual libertarian government. It was, in fact, such an interesting move that the cell phones of Santiago Caputo, Milei’s strategist, and those of various priests from La Libertad Avanza were in great demand these days. Many thought that there was someone behind the new calm of the libertarian and the bombastic statements towards the former president. But all of them answered the same, although they did not finish clearing up all the doubts. They assure that it was “one hundred percent of Javier’s move”, and some are encouraged to give their own opinion. “These two talk more than what is known, but it has to stay there. If Mauricio gets too close to us, it doesn’t suit us either, we lose the spirit of the new. Just as we come, we are barbaric ”.
intrigues.
In Together for Change, Macri’s pampering of Milei was interpreted in several different ways. The first, of course, is that of the wing closest to the former president, who made an effort to demonstrate that the only priority of the founder of the space is to ensure that the next president is Bullrich. “We understand that there may be some confusion, but Mauricio spent almost a year trying to get her to win Horacio’s internship, he is not going to get off now that he has just won it,” they say, with the recorder turned off. Fernando de Andreis, former Secretary General of the Presidency, insists that “there is no possibility” of an understanding between Milei and Macri and that his support “is clear and forceful” towards the yellow candidate.
And they point to evidence to support their case. They say that as soon as the former president set foot in Morocco, on Saturday the 19th, he looked for a quiet place to talk “at length” with Bullrich. And that since then he tries to talk to her at least once a day, even if he is in a relaxed environment, far from the news, and even one night he has stayed up late celebrating the birthday of one of his teammates. “I told Mauricio. He is on top of this Titanic, in a luxurious dressing room, but he is on top. If the ship sinks, we all sink ”, he provides a source from this circle, in what would seem not to be such a blind trust towards Macri’s intentions.
Among those who trust the good faith of the protagonist of this cover are those who insist that everything is part of an electoral play. “To steal votes from Milei, you don’t have to go head-on, attacking him, leaving him in the place of a victim, and even less fighting with his voters. You have to do what Mauricio did, seduce them, enter them from the side, appropriate that vote ”, they agree both close to Bullrich and Macri. In the “La Piba” campaign, in fact, they have already begun to get down to business: they commissioned several surveys that will arrive in the last week of August, and they say they already have some numbers to think about the strategy for October. They point to the vote for women (“Milei has twice as many votes for men as for women”, they say), to the “vote for fear” (“we must insist that she is a character who is not qualified to govern”) and also to aspire to get a vote out of the Government. On that road there was already a sign: the group “La Puto Bullrich” was reactivated, an LGBT group that defends that candidacy and that seeks to bring it closer to a more progressive voter. Two unknowns remain in this camp. The challenge to retain Larreta and his voters, and the impact of an even worse spiraling of the economic crisis. “There some voter from Massa can go to Milei”, they say.
On the other side of the PRO crack, they distrust the versions that see a chess move from Macri behind his praise for Milei. Some compare it to a famous joke from the seventies: Perón ordered Firmenich to be shot and he, seconds before dying, said “what a great move by the General”. “The most purists of Mauricio trust in the infallibility of the leader, and they can turn any nonsense he does into a great act. And this is clearly not the case”, says someone who treated the descendant of Calabrians a lot.
In fact, several voiced that anger. Alfonso Prat Gay, “Toty” Flores, Elisa Carrió, Maxi Ferraro and Ricardo López Murphy were some of the leading names in the coalition that, with the recorder on, targeted Macri. “Not only was he not neutral internally, but now he is not being neutral in general, because there is a kind of flirtation with Milei that confuses the voter a lot,” shot Prat Gay, the former finance minister of his government. The thesis of this side is clear: they say that, beyond any objectionable doubt, Macri’s flirtations towards the libertarian harm the force. “Mauricio installs the idea that Milei is part of the family, he is the half-crazy cousin but he sits at the same table as us. This reading is not a strategic move, it is something deeply destructive, it does not add, it subtracts, it presents him as someone good for the macristas, friendly, it legitimizes him ”, they point out.
The curious thing is that several maintain that, although this position is harmful, Macri does not do it entirely consciously. “It is a mixture of conviction and convenience. Mauricio truly believes that Milei’s ideas are similar to those of the PRO, and therefore in the 30 percent that the libertarian drew, he not only feels vindicated, almost as a kind of revenge, but he seems to have convinced himself that in In 2019 we lost for not having been Milei, for not having gone so far. But it is not like that: those ideas may be those of Mauricio, but they were never those of the PRO, much less those of the coalition”, they say. There is a fiber there that touches the Hubris syndrome, the leader’s disease, Macri’s narcissistic wound due to the re-election that never came and that now, he thinks, the victory in Milei’s PASO seems to begin to heal. “I’ve been telling him that he was going to do well, I saw it coming,” the former president said on more than one occasion on electoral Sunday night, in which he celebrated not only the victory of his candidate but also that of his Cousin Jorge on Martin Lousteau.
Win-win.
There is, of course, a third reading. It is the one that points to the most calculating side of Macri, the one with the Calabrian blood that runs through his veins. For some who closely followed the flirtation with Milei, what the former president is looking for is to have a win-win option for 2024. “He is playing a double winning card. If Patricia wins, he wins, and if Milei wins, he wins too. In the middle he shits his own political construction, that of the PRO, but he is going to be well off one way or another, ”say the most distrustful.
This suspicion is also fed by a reality: La Libertad Avanza, a party that was born only two years ago, has a notable lack of technical cadres and militants to occupy all the positions of a possible government, and also to aspire to a majority in the Chambers, so in one way or another they will tend to seek some kind of alliance. And that hand could be given, precisely, by the former president. “Mauricio thinks that if Milei were to win the election, he would need a lot of people, in a very difficult context, and that in this scenario he would be able to get more people into the Cabinet or in positions of power than with Patricia,” says another source. Would Macri be able to reach that instance?
For now these are speculations. And the talks between Macri and Milei remain a secret kept under lock and key. Only the two of them and Alberto Benegas Lynch, the ideological mentor of the libertarian whom the former president historically respected and who served as a link in the first three virtual meetings, know.
In Together they fear that this game, that of the cat and the lion, could end badly for all those who were not invited to the game.
