Those who work at Radio Miter tell the following story: they swear that when Mario Pergolini was offered to take charge of the first morning, after Jorge Lanata’s health condition prevented him from continuing at the helm, he rejected the invitation but offered to add Dante Gebel to the station. Although the proposal was tempting – the religious influencer was for a long time the most listened to on Vorterix, the radio station that Pergolini founded -, in the end it did not prosper. But it marks the closeness between the two.
The businessman produces “La divina noche”, Gebel’s program on El Trece. The cycle manages a budget that is no longer usually seen on Argentine television: each Gebel program interviews some prominent celebrity at the River Arena – Wanda Nara, Ricardo Darín and Guillermo Francella passed by, to name a few – who are invited not only to fly to the United States but also a week in a luxury hotel, plus transportation and all travel expenses. One of those who participated in the series says that the trip includes, before the note, a long meeting with Gebel, where he tells his biography and in which he adds one more piece of information: that he plans to return to live in Argentina at some point. If this indeed ends up happening, Pergolini will be at your side.
Jorge Lanata died at the end of 2024. Before, in a meeting in which they talked about God and death, he even expressed to Gebel one of the wishes he had: to see him in Argentine politics. “If you send me, I want to be part of your team,” the journalist told him. Pergolini, who not only produces it but accompanies it like a shadow, was the only witness to that conversation.
The man of God has had a brush with politics for a long time. Daniel Scioli calls him his “friend”, he has interviewed the libertarian Agustín Laje on his program and he even blessed the Salvadoran Nayib Bukele the day he assumed his second term, after he bypassed the entire division of powers in his country. Now Gebel is tempted to take a step further. Working close to him are the unionist Juan Pablo Brey – who leads part of Fuerza Argentina, a Peronist group that includes metrodelegate Néstor Segovia and leader K Gabriel Mariotto, although for now he says that the spiritual influencer is not his candidate – and the Buenos Aires legislator Eugenio Casielles, one of the founding members of La Libertad Avanza, among others. Gebel candidate posters can already be seen near Congress and the 25 de Mayo highway.
