2021 was another busy year for Maximiliano Abad. After several months in the military and touring the province, the man became the new president of the Buenos Aires UCR. Those who know the cloth say that a single internal radical is equivalent to the work of two national elections, and by the time Abad won his it was just March. There was still the closing of the lists -in which, after years of insisting, he managed to convince Facundo Manes to present himself as a candidate-, and the primary and general votes and then the debate for the re-election of the mayors, law in the that the protagonist of this note had a key role in modifying it.
Abad is now resting from all that give and take. The Buenos Aires deputy, where he is head of the Together for Change bloc, takes off his political suit for a while and sits at the end of a long barbecue table in General Madariaga. The local mayor, Esteban Santoro, invited him to share a barbecue at the start of 2022. In the middle of the meal and the talk, NEWS also sneaks in and, how could it be otherwise, when the desserts arrive, the political debate. The recorder turns on.
News: Why the change of the re-elections of mayors? Your own strength had changed that law in 2016.
Maximiliano Abad: We made a decision based on conviction and power. Of conviction because we definitively limited indefinite reelections, something that, with the 2019 regulation, it was clear that it was not going to happen; and of power because we agree that we could not reach 2023 with the pitch tilted in the Province. We want to beat Kirchnerism on all fronts, we cannot give them an advantage on any, and in Buenos Aires the field was tilted in their favor. Many Peronist mayors in the suburbs found a trap in the law with the request for licenses or resignations, and if the law continued as it was, the Peronist mayors would be able to present themselves in 2023 and those of Together would not. We need to defeat a model of concentration of power with hegemonic pretensions and an authoritarian way of doing politics; that he withdraws into himself and continues without listening to the message that our compatriots gave him at the polls. For that, radicalism has proposed to return to being a party of power, and wants to govern Argentina.
News: Now, that generated a deep debate in the space. Vidal spoke of “privileges of politics.”
Abad: Everyone has the right to an opinion, but of course we do not agree with María Eugenia’s opinion on the subject. She and Martín Lousteau said that the decree had to be repealed, but the decree is repealed by the governor. It is his faculty, and therefore that could not happen. Now the law has a lock clause that says that if the exercise of the position is done for a single day, it is computed as a mandate. This law is better than the one approved by his government.
News: Radicalism closed a very active year. Are you preparing for the PASO in 2023?
Abad: Radicalism has several candidates for President, something that is good for the party but also for the coalition. Gerardo Morales, Gustavo Valdés, and of course Facundo Manes, who was encouraged to take the plunge, to name a few. In 2023 Argentina will have a president of the Radical Civic Union, I am sure.
