The Argentine Congress is ready to debate the national reestablishment proposed by President Javier Milei. After a month of negotiations, deputies began this Wednesday to discuss the mega-law presented by the President on December 28 with 664 articles, including emergency legislative powers, the power to sell state-owned companies and even changing the electoral system. The project stands at less than 400 points as the government seeks consensus, which was not secured at the end of Tuesday.
The meeting opened after ten in the morning in the presence of 137 MPs. To make the debate possible, Milei needed at least 129 of the 257 representatives who make up the lower house of Congress. The quorum was guaranteed with the 38 seats of the ruling party, which represents the first minority in the House of Representatives, with the 37 seats of the PRO of former conservative President Mauricio Macri, the 34 seats of the center-right Radical Civic Union (UCR) and a large one Bloc of federal forces and other minority groups, as well as some deputies from the Peronist alliance Unión por la Patria and the Left, who oppose the project.
The blocs of the so-called “dialogue opposition” had confirmed their presence in Congress. However, only the PRO has assured that he “fully supports” the project. “From our side, the quorum and the vote as a whole are guaranteed,” said block leader Cristian Ritondo on Tuesday afternoon after his team’s last meeting. Rodrigo de Loredo, head of the UCR bloc, explained that his bloc would also accompany the vote “despite the disorganization with which the executive was subjected to the treatment” and “the complaints expressed.” We will provide the tools to enable a government just starting out to implement its management plan. We demand a reasonable session in your proceedings. “Roman circuses, no,” he wrote on his social networks on Tuesday morning after the last meeting of his deputies.
The session, originally scheduled for this Tuesday, stalled last week while the government negotiated concessions on some points of the law and Milei circulated complaints on social networks to opponents and reported to the press. Reforming the system for measuring pension increases and increasing taxes on regional exports ultimately brought the government into conflict with the majority of congressmen and governors that the government hoped to persuade. After the government late Friday fired a minister who allegedly leaked to the press that Milei threatened to cut off federal funding to governors and “leave them penniless” for defying export tariffs, the government decided to close the tax chapter of the law to delete, which also provided for withholding taxes, the reform of pension increases, flexibility in money laundering or the waiver of interest on late payments.
Since mid-January, the government has maintained that it did not negotiate the content of this law, but gave in to its loneliness in Congress. Milei is no longer seeking up to four years of special powers that allow him to rule by decree, now he is asking for just two years. He also accepted the “errors” in writing the security chapter, in which an article proposed the control of public gatherings of more than three people, and removed the oil company YPF from the list of 41 state-owned companies that he wants to privatize. There are now 37, and three others, such as Banco Nación, the power producer Nucleoeléctrica and the satellite telecommunications company ARSAT, are only open to partial capitalization. Nor will it attempt to reform the electoral system.
Milei remained publicly silent about the negotiations but was active on social media. As the government continued to negotiate on Monday evening, the president expressed his opinion with a retweet to a senator in the Buenos Aires parliament who called the opposition a “blackmail blockade” and accused it of wanting to “continue to make a living from politics.”
This Wednesday, the deputy Nicolás Massot, a former member of the PRO and now part of the HCF alliance, responded. “The only thing the government wants is to create an enemy,” Massot said in a radio interview, in which he assured that Milei “has no interest in this law” and that he seeks “legitimacy in the conflict.” The head of his bloc, Miguel Ángel Pichetto, later calmed down. “We must strive for the law to be passed and for the government to have tools that the president considers important,” he said, calling on the government to sit down and talk to provincial governors. “When you talk about taking everything away from them, you talk about people who will suffer,” he complained to Milei.
The law has been a headache for the center-right opposition, which has preferred Mileis dissent rather than siding with Peronism in the face of Mileis's proposal for radical change.
Peronism denounces that the treatment of the law, which was reviewed and approved in expert commissions last week, is full of “ambiguities and a lack of transparency.” “None of the national deputies know what the text that they actually want to adopt will look like,” said the leader of the Peronist Bank, Germán Martínez, this Tuesday. According to Martínez, the text of the law to be voted on was changed after its adoption last Wednesday morning. The suspicion was later confirmed by an HCF deputy who confirmed last Thursday that he had been invited to meetings away from Congress in Buenos Aires' Recoleta district. “I went to one of the meetings and when I saw who was there and what they were doing, I left,” he said. “We meet with the authorities of the chamber, we do not touch opinions nor are we interested in improving opinions. For us, this case is already closed and we will not go to any other meeting except with the authorities of the chamber.”
The debate is scheduled for this Wednesday at 10 a.m. in Buenos Aires. It will be a marathon: MPs will debate point by point the law, which aims to change much of the country's political, economic and social structure. Analysts expect at least 40 hours of debate. The result is in the air.
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