Dinner was on Friday night. The host was the journalist Eduardo Feinmannand the invited diners, the producer Juan Cruz Avilathe businessman Alejandro Macfarlane, the former president Mauricio Macri and the partners of all of them.
On the afternoon of that day, when the meat for the barbecue was already thawing, the host of La Nación + had the idea to tempt fate: to invite someone on the hour who he knows not only has quite busy days but also He also maintains high tension with Macri. Perhaps the proposal that he sent to Javier Milei to join was one of those invitations that are made imagining that for one reason or another the other is going to reject it. It was not the case. The president-elect arrived at Feinmann’s home in Palermo with his girlfriend Fatima Florez.
The meeting served to loosen the distance that had been growing between Milei and Macri since the former rejected the invitations to create a co-government and to add some people from the PRO to his future cabinet. Between courses they talked about the Argentina that is coming, about how they imagine the opposition will stand and also about the role of the media. The NEWS covers snuck into that conversation.
There was not, however, a direct and frank talk about the problems that the relationship between the two political leaders is going through, although the dinner was the prelude to another, more private one. That happened two days later, on Sunday, at Macri’s Quinta Los Abrojos, exactly seven days before the economist assumed the presidency of the Nation. But, despite the shared meals, the situation is far from what the engineer imagined. Nothing has been resolved and storms are looming on the horizon.
Ballad for a crazy
The axis of the conflict is that Macri imagined a greater presence in the government that starts. That was not just positions and names (Justice and YPF, to mention just a few areas) but the fact of monopolizing the influence peddling, becoming the interlocutor and negotiator before Milei of everything Together for Change. The reality proved to be very different: the economist agreed privately and through separate channels to add Luis Caputo and Patricia Bullrich, and then via her he added Luis Petri to Defense. All this, of course, caused deep anger in Macri, more with his former allies than with Milei.
But the final straw was the appointment of Martin Menem in the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies. It must be understood that the first meeting between the former president and the new one, the day after the electoral victory, included the list of terms, conditions and names that Macri brought. There it was, on the podium, the request by Cristian Ritondo to command the Lower House. But Milei did not accept that last treat and provoked the Calabrian’s fury. “He is making a mistake, let him do what he wants but he is making a mistake,” the former president is repeating these days. In public, the PRO deputies were even harsher. “The Government chose a path that is different from working together from minute zero. It will be negotiated law by law,” said Federico Angelini, vice president of the yellow bloc.
In this line we could read something of what would seem to be the future. Milei is going to have a large minority in the Chambers, He put someone with zero experience in charge of Deputies and the PRO has already warned that it will not be easy to add. Is that why the President preferred to speak before the public and not inside Congress on the day of the inauguration? Will Congress – as it was for the Peruvian Alberto Fujimori – be the great enemy for the coming ruling party? Already in the campaign, the libertarian warned that if he could not pass a law in the chamber he was going to promote a plebiscite or a popular referendum. And the one who warns…
timer
Macri would seem to have the same idea he had Sergio Massa four years ago. That of playing the long game and waiting, because she knows that politics in Argentina is very dynamic. The Tigrense, for example, entered as president of Deputies and ended up being the de facto president of the country and candidate. The engineer, resigned to Milei’s systematic rejections, is on a similar path. “Javier is putting together a cabinet with many new people and wants to take drastic measures. I want to see what he does when things get complicated,” they say close to the PRO founder.
Macri himself seems to support this theory, or at least that is clear from the tweet he posted to congratulate – or not so much – the appointment of Caputo and Bullrich. He spoke there of them as the “first team.” Is it an encrypted signal? Everything points to that, especially knowing that the engineer is not a man to turn the other cheek. Rather the complete opposite.
Macri vs. Bullrich.
These are busy days at La Libertad Avanza. And also for the PRO. In the Government, the novelty is how two founding partners were completely eliminated. Are Victoria Villarruel and Ramiro Marra. The vice president had been promised control of the Defense and Security portfolios. None of that happened, and the relationship between her and Milei (especially with Karina, her sister) is in a terrible place. Something similar happened to Marra, and he was fired from the government by Karina.
It has to do with the reconfiguration from space. This is where the internal LLA intersects with that of the yellow party. The thing is that Macri is furious about what he understands was an unfair move by Patricia Bullrich, who on her own agreed to join Milei’s government.
However, those around the new Minister of Security are not so convinced of that, and they recount all the times that Macri himself left Bullrich “down” during this campaign and that of 2021. Both political spaces are in conflict. full transformation.
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