The internal crisis within the PRO after the decision of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta that the Buenos Aires elect their local authorities through electronic ballot continued to escalate today, and in a party meeting Mauricio Macri recalled that the Buenos Aires head of government “has the pen circumstantially ” and complained because he did not consult his decision with the rest of the party.
The conflict had started yesterday at noon, when Larreta announced through a recorded video that the elections in the City would be held on the same dates as the national ones, but with the particularity that the vote of municipal authorities would take place through ballot. electronic only.
This decision went against what Mauricio Macri, Patricia Bullrich and María Eugenia Vidal had publicly requested, who considered -after Larreta’s announcement- that the mayor had changed the rules of the game in the middle of an election year, and came out to question him publicly.
According to the hard wing of the PRO, with his decision, Larreta ended up favoring the radical pre-candidate for the Buenos Aires mayor, Martín Lousteau, to the detriment of Jorge Macri, the PRO candidate with the best chances of facing the pre-candidacy to succeed him.
The issue did not end there, and the PRO urgently met its political table this morning -via Zoom- to analyze the issue.
According to what could be reconstructed from sources that participated in the meeting, a very angry Mauricio Macri complained that Larreta made the decision without consulting the party.
Macri, Bullrich, Vidal, Cristian Ritondo, Humberto Schiavoni, Federico Angelini, Laura Rodríguez Machado and Fernando De Andreis participated in this morning’s meeting: while Eduardo Machiavelli and Diego Santilli, Larreta’s candidate for the Buenos Aires government.
Machiavelli, in defense of the head of government, argued that Larreta’s decision was based on the electoral code, as Larreta himself stated this morning.
Macri, visibly obfuscated -according to the sources- told him that it is not a formal decision, but a political one, and protested because Larreta did not consult with the rest of the party.
The meeting lasted an hour and a quarter and, unlike other times, Bullrich did not take the lead, but the angriest were Macri and Vidal himself.
“Mauricio expressed his anger, his disappointment, he feels that he was lied to. They said that the decision had not been made when Larreta had recorded the video many days before,” one of the participants in the meeting told this agency.
He was referring to the video in which the head of government announced the day and the way in which the people of Buenos Aires will vote for their local candidates, broadcast yesterday at noon.
“Mauricio is very sorry that this decision was made without political consultation at the party table,” said the sources consulted by this agency, who added that, according to Macri, “the fact that Horacio (Rodríguez Larreta) circumstantially has the pen does not exempt him from consulting these types of decisions.”
The members of the PRO political table agreed to meet in the coming days, this time in person, to continue debating this issue.
The hardest wing of the PRO was also angered by the fact that Larreta slipped, in an interview, that the final word on whether Jorge Macri is in a formal condition to be a candidate in the City should be taken by the Justice, in the face of possible questions raised by the Radical Civic Union and the Civic Coalition, who claimed that he did not meet the requirements.
In the midst of this controversy, Larreta defended his decision this morning by stating that what he did was “comply with the law”, and remarked that “the unity of the PRO and Juntos por el Cambio (JxC) is more guaranteed than ever”.
“In the City, the Electoral Code is clear: it was modified in 2018 and has been in force since 2020, and it says that you vote with a single ballot, that is what the law says,” said Larreta, who indicated that, according to that regulation, what remained to be defined was whether that instrument was going to be “paper or electronic”.
“One can decide the instrument, if it is paper or electronic, but the only decision I made is to comply with the law,” said the Buenos Aires head of government and presidential candidate in the framework of an act that he led this morning at the Cuartel de Firefighters II “Patricios”, located at Avenida Caseros 2849.
Given the questions he received for the decision from the PRO, particularly through former president Mauricio Macri; the head of the PRO, Patricia Bullrich; and of the national deputy María Eugenia Vidal, Rodríguez Larreta remarked that voting with a single electronic ballot is “a flag” that he has proposed “for years.”
Thus, he argued, “it ends with this that they hide the ballot from you, with the pointer, the sheet list ends, it is the most transparent way” to vote.
Meanwhile, regarding the decision to make the Buenos Aires elections coincide with the national ones in terms of dates, Larreta maintained that he did it “so that the Buenos Aires do not have to go six times” to the polls, something that, in addition, “would be more expensive”.
