journalist and editor, Paul Avelluto is the point man behind the new book of Mauricio Macri, “What for”. Not only did he edit it, but he helped make it. He jumped into politics and macrismo in 2012, when he left the leadership of the Random House Mondadori group. And during the presidency that began in 2015, he was in charge of the culture Ministrya management criticized for its budget and personnel cuts, but aligned with the macrista designs, which gradually turned him into a presidential kidney man.
He earned that spot when Mauricio Macri lived his darkest hours: defeated in 2019 in the STEP by Alberto Fernandezthe president sank into a tantrum, holding the electorate responsible for the devaluation jump. There was apparently no turning back, when Avelluto told him the epic story of the Menem caravans in 1989: the Menemobile ended up relegating Antonio Cafierothe best ranked candidate in the internal Peronism, and then the radical Eduardo Angeloz in the presidential elections.
Avelluto inspired Macri with the mystique of return, which translated into the “Caravan of Change” that allowed the former president to grow ten points in the Second round. A sell expensive defeat that meant much more to Macri: it reconnected him with his basic ideas (quite similar to those of the menemist neoliberalism that are exposed today in his new book), and with the street, after four years of confinement in his inner circle. And she allowed him to finally get his hopes up with a “second time”, PRO version of the Kirchnerist catchphrase “we will come back”.
Yes “First time”, the book that Macri presented in March 2021 -also edited by Avelluto-, was a clean pass of his presidency with quotas of self-criticism, “Why” is proposed as a roadmap for an eventual return to power. He collects his lectures and university lectures from the last stretch, and the exchanges with various leaders. In those pages he proposes changes to what he did in his government: he discards gradualism (“it was the product of our weakness and not of our vocation”), and points to a cut in state and social spending, discarding “parasitic intermediation” and promoting in-depth reforms.
“What is not done from the outset is very likely to never be done,” writes Macri, who proclaims that there is no plan of a thousand days, but of a hundred, and an intensive plan of ten. Shock therapy.
“There is a fact that Mauricio points out in his book, which is the change of society. The same society that in 2015 still had reservations about a course of these characteristics, even among those who voted for Macri, began to change for various reasons. One of them was the failure of the subsequent Kirchnerist experience, today we are worse, in all aspects, than when we were bad at the end of 2019”, explains Avelluto.
“Society was mutating and transforming over iYou think that at one time they were taboo. Today with the liberal economic newspaper, the idea of greater freedom, fewer regulations, reducing the tax burden and at the same time improving the quality of the services provided by the State, has greater support from Argentines. that item, and a clear government programis what will guarantee that the changes are deep and lasting”, emphasizes the former Minister of Culture and curator of “For what”.
In this sense, Avelluto explains that Macri understood that his mistake was to focus on “the republican question” and not promote the “internal debate regarding the economic course.” And he recognizes that those of the former president “are not new ideas, but have been in the Argentine political debate for a long time”, but precisely for this reason they are a “debt of politics towards the Argentines.”
“I noticed when I was editing the book that the route that Macri was beginning to take went more towards his own experience, his personal learning, his decisions, the breaking points throughout his life. He went deeper, full of examples, stories and anecdotes”, says Avelluto.
“For what” is for Macri and his curator a leaving behind the “declaration of good intentions”. “There was a core of basic coincidences with the governors who pointed in this same direction, and then we had tons of stones in Congress to sanction the pension reform,” summarizes the editor about the failed agreements.
The Macri in Avelluto version that appears in “Why” plays with the idea of rethinking politics as an outsider. “Mauricio always had a feeling of not being entirely part of the system,” he concludes.
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