On Saturday, April 29, a shout surprised the people of La Rioja who were drinking vermouth and having snacks in the bars of the capital of the province. Suddenly, a thousand people (most of them young) appeared from the pedestrian street and ended up in the central plaza singing and following the man with blue eyes and tousled hair in a black leather jacket who raised his arms, smiled non-stop and stood up. He let me take hundreds of selfies.
“Step by step, it came javier milei!!!”, the fans chanted, with field music inspired by a lyric by Mona Giménez. For the first time, the revelation of the presidential polls was shown in a province far from Buenos Aires together with its own candidate for governor. And it wasn’t just any candidate. Martin Menemprovincial deputy, is the nephew of a former president (Carlos Menem) and the son of a former senator (Eduardo Menem). Fed from the cradle with the milk of politics, no libertarian can deny that he belongs to what Milei has successfully demonized as the political caste.
The chemistry between Milei and a blood heir to Menem seemed like a biblical prophecy. An invisible thread unites the idea of dollarization and that of Menem’s convertibility. And the candidate who intimidates Peronists, radicals and macristas never tires of praising Carlos Menem and domingo horse. The second-generation Menem was the perfect candidate for a first electoral test in a neglected northwestern province.
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In fact, Milei put it that way when visiting The Rioja. “They never realized that liberalism is the movement of the oppressed,” he exaggerated, as if he were an anti-imperialist leader and excited by the pre-election polls that predict obtaining many votes in the segments of the lower middle class, and even the upper class. low. A feeling that the libertarians reinforced when Cristina Kirchner chose them as enemies.
But the first offshore experiment in urban centers launched by Milei did not achieve the expected results. Martín Menem was third, more than 30 points behind the re-elected Kirchner governor (Ricardo Quintela) almost 20 behind the candidate of Together for Change (Philip Alvarez). At least in La Rioja, the candidates for dollarization and the anti-caste discourse were far behind. Politics gets a lot more complicated when he gets out on the pitch and away from Twitter and social media.
Milei and his family will have to learn the election this Sunday in La Rioja. Large-scale electoral bets require a much higher degree of professionalism, organization, and oversight, characteristics that were conspicuous by their absence in the libertarian army. The poll numbers are very encouraging, but they are insufficient when it comes to real politics.
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As much as she insults them and accuses them of sinisters, Milei should carefully observe the show of force that two of her adversaries made on Sunday night: Gerardo Morales and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta. the governor of Jujuy He managed to get his candidate to succeed him (the economist Carlos Sadir) to triumph with almost 50% of the votes, reinforcing his presidential commitment and the role of the UCR in the self-destructive internship of Together for Change.
Morales completed the photo with the also presidential presence of Rodriguez Larreta; that of the radical candidate for Buenos Aires head of government, Martin Lousteau; that of the president of the Civic Coalition, Maximilian Ferraro and even that of the mayor of San Isidro, Gustavo Posse. All of them are part of the political armament that confronts the opposition coalition with the candidacy of Patricia Bullrichwho has the backing of the radical Alfredo Cornejo and the sometimes suffocating support of Mauricio Macri.
“It is a triumph of Together for Change; the Argentines want a change and this is the way”, Rodríguez Larreta shouted from the Jujuy stage, marking what was the bet of the group that was up there. All of them, the same as Bullrich and the most staunch macrismo, know perfectly well that the coalition brand has been giving up voting intentions to the detriment of Javier Milei. And that they have a few weeks left to give some sign of rationality that will prevent them from draining voters.
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This Monday the main leaders of the PRO will meet again (including Rodríguez Larreta, Bullrich and Mary Eugenia Vidal) to try to find common ways to unify the electoral strategy and, above all, to allow them to agree on the name of a single candidate in the City. Macri encourages his cousin, Jorge Macri; He larrets his minister, Fernan Quiros; and the possibility that she ends up being Vidal the Buenos Aires consensus candidate also sounds. The deputy took photos with Patricia and Horacio, but she admits that she lacks the decisive support of Macri to be able to move forward. “Mauricio is the obstacle”, she has confided to her collaborators. And there the situation is frozen.
Since he got out of the presidential candidacy, Macri began a demolition task on the other figures of the PRO. First was the charge against Rodríguez Larreta, whom he destroyed in a rostrum of the Rural Society and before an audience made up of the country’s main businessmen. In the same speech he praised the figure of Javier Milei. A revenge that the macrismo would regret days later, when the figure of the libertarian began to consolidate his electoral capital at the expense of the opposition.
In recent days, Macri has also managed to arouse the anger of Patricia Bullrich, who received comments from businessmen and economists. It happened that the former president, in indiscreet dialogues with members of the establishment, suggested that a future cabinet of the former minister would bear his personal stamp. It was mentioned to Gustavo Garavanoto William Dietrich and Andrés Ibarra as future ministers of Bullrich.
The intrigues launched by the macrismo exhausted the patience of Patricia Bullrich, who excluded herself from the meeting of the presidential candidates of Together for Change seven days ago. As happened to Rodríguez Larreta a few weeks ago, the former minister does not want her image to be consolidated as that of a candidate who is part of Macri’s overcoming strategy. The ghost of Cristina and Alberto Fernández as puppet president is the one that none of them want to repeat.
Between inflation, the dollar crisis and now the effect of the recession on the economy, the government is trying to find a loophole that will move it away from the scenario of electoral catastrophe that all the polls predict. Cristina and Sergio Massa count the days until next Sunday arrives. It is that in the five provinces where there will be elections, Peronism would prevail without major problems. It does not solve the main problem, but it will be a relief and an opportunity to relaunch the government.
On May 14 they will go to the polls in Tucuman, where the favorites are the traditional Peronists Osvaldo Jaldo and Juan Manzur. In San Juan, the young Peronist governor Sergio Uñac should be re-elected. The same will be tried by the “management” Peronist Sergio Ziliotto in The Pampathe alternative peronist Gustavo Saenz in jump and the Patagonian Peronist Gustavo Melella in Land of Fire. The tendency in Peronism is to seek a differentiated profile that will detach them from the Kirchnerist disaster.
This Friday, two days before the five provincial elections, all the candidates will have to go through the bitter pill of the INDEC announcement with the April inflation rate. The number close to 8% that is expected almost with resignation is a kick in the coccyx for each of the candidates, almost as painful as the one that the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, will receive.
That is why the government’s brief attempt to postpone the announcement of the April price rise exploded like a bomb. Massa had to deactivate it a couple of hours after it was announced because the impact on the image of the minister who wants to be a candidate for president was devastating.
The manipulation of the inflation index, led by Guillermo Moreno, was the first hack that at the end of 2006 began to pierce the credibility of the first years of Kirchnerism. Seventeen years have passed since that statistical nonsense with political consequences. But the temptation seems to have returned in these days of confusion and despair.
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