Pedro González
Journalist
By hook or by crook; with or without the political backing of Parliament, Javier Milei has offered the parliamentary majority that is not his own a good carrot, while wielding a stake of considerable dimensions if they do not accept the deal. It was his first prime-time address to the country, a sort of state of the nation address in which he insisted on the essential points of the programme of radical change with which he won the presidential elections.
Honouring his liberal credo, the Argentine president addressed a hemicycle that, contrary to its custom of noisy shouting, this time remained silent during the almost eighty minutes of his speech. But, at the same time, he was aware of the expectation of the country, which in the first hundred days of Milei’s government has seen the peso devalued by another 50%, the disappearance of a large part of the ocean of subsidies and an evident slowdown in economic activity. More than to the deputies of a hemicycle that is already showing its teeth, Milei asked Argentines for “patience and confidence”. He argued that it was necessary to “get out of the moral and intrinsically unjust bankruptcy” that Kirchnerist Peronism has left as an inheritance.
As for the deputies and governors of the provinces, whom he has begun to subject to progressive financial asphyxiation, he told them that the catalogue of reforms will continue, “whether it has parliamentary support or whether it is necessary to resort to the legal tools at its disposal”, essentially decrees. For Milei, containing the brutal budget deficit is non-negotiable, private property is inviolable and public spending cannot continue to be sustained by the artifice of activating the banknote printing machine day and night.
All this made up the offensive arsenal of his speech, which, however, was counterbalanced by the offer of a great political agreement, which he called the May Pact, with the idea that the entire political and ruling class would sign it, with the head of state at its head, on 25 May in the city of Córdoba. The date and place are highly symbolic. On 25 May 1810, the first Junta de Gobierno Patria was proclaimed in Buenos Aires, ousting the viceroy Cisneros. However, some of the Cordoba authorities did not comply and started a counter-revolution. After the ensuing war and the corresponding execution of the losers, the revolution finally triumphed with the proclamation of Argentina’s independence six years later.
The offer is Milei’s big political bullet, which will once again make the political class as a whole accountable to the people. A class that the president has not ceased to denigrate after taking office, especially after the first parliamentary battle in which he was forced to cut back on a large part of the measures in his programme. “Nest of rats”, “symbol of a corrupt caste of the privileged” are some of the many epithets with which Milei has singled out his opponents, especially the followers of former vice-president Cristina Fernández, thus counteracting the offensive that the Kirchnerist trade unions and the usual piquetero commandos, whom Milei describes as the “mafia”, and whom he blames for having taken Argentina to unknown levels of poverty and decadence, had begun to draw.
To the governors of the provinces, Milei has urged them to facilitate the achievement of his liberal policy objectives or he will put the squeeze where it hurts the most, in the amount of financial transfers. And, finally, to both the political class and the common people, he once again pointed out that “today’s sacrifices will allow us to reap tomorrow the fruits of economic recovery”, recognising that it is an unprecedented experience in the country to leave behind the poultices and attack directly the cause of the evil that plagues the once opulent Argentina.
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