It was already early this Saturday morning and a large group of police officers continued controlling streets in the vicinity of Congress, in the center of Buenos Aires.. It was the end of three days of extreme tensions in Argentine politics, the closing of a week that brought success to President Javier Milei with the approval of the omnibus law, although the opposition had partially scrapped it.. A week that demonstrated, once again, that politics in Argentina is resolved in the offices, but also in the streets.
“The country is not for sale!” chanted a thin group of protesters.. 10 meters away, a passerby was talking to himself, almost shouting: “What do you blame Milei for, if he hasn't done anything yet? Don't you remember Alberto Fernández?”
Everything happened in the midst of devastating temperatures, 30 degrees and high humidity at night after a day in which the thermal sensation was well above 40. And it will continue to be like this for the next two weeks.. After approving the Law of Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of Argentines by 144 votes in favor and 109 against – from Kirchnerism and the hard left -, the Chamber of Deputies will debate the articles of the law on Tuesday. Once this step is passed, the text will go to the Senate. If it is approved, and the signs are favorable in that sense, the rookie Milei, with only 38 deputies out of 257 and seven senators in a Chamber of 72, will have scored an indisputable success.
“No government in the 40 years of Argentine democracy has carried out a reform of this depth,” highlighted Rodrigo de Loredo, parliamentary spokesman for the Radical Civic Union (UCR), a social democratic party that governed with Raúl Alfonsín and Fernando de la Rúa and was part of Mauricio Macri's coalition. Criticism of the UCR for having supported the law has been strong, but De Loredo knows that the voters of the UCR gave a very large majority of their vote to Milei in the second electoral round in November to block the way for the Peronist Sergio Massa.. Blocking the Milei government was not an option. “We approve what is necessary for governability, we reject what is harmful to the republic!”, summarizes De Loredo.
This rejection of “what is harmful” extended to other parliamentary groups, such as Macri's PRO, and a diverse alliance of moderate Peronists and social democrats.. The sum of these three groups allowed Milei to approve a law that lost a lot in the parliamentary process, but remains a powerful instrument of reform.
“We support the law because it is a step towards transformation and change, which is what the people voted for,” Daiana Fernández Molero, PRO deputy, told EL MUNDO.. “We believe that we had to guarantee the government a toolbox so that it could govern after the social and economic crisis left by Kirchnerism.. And in the negotiation we improved the law a lot.”
The original 664 articles of the law were less than half complete. The tax reform and the moratorium, as well as the electoral reform, were erased from the law; The list of companies to be privatized was reduced – Aerolíneas Argentinas remains, but YPF was removed; the closure of cultural institutions was stopped; the open bar for foreigners to buy land; the weakening of environmental controls and the forest fire law; as well as the reforms to the fishing law that left Argentine fisheries at the mercy of competition from China, Taiwan and Spain, among other countries.. The superpowers Milei requested were also severely curtailed.
Even so, the combination of the law with the vast decree of necessity and urgency (DNU) that was approved in December gives Milei a series of tools of notable scope.
Another thing is that the president knows how to use them, warns analyst Martín Rodríguez Yebra in La Nación: “In that sea of opponents that Milei describes as 'the caste' perplexity reigns. Dealing with a foreign body. “Those who extend their hand to help often bite it back.”
The president “insistent on overacting audacity as a way to make up for his lack of deputies and senators. “He believes in a direct link with society, without intermediaries.”
That direct link is on social networks. Milei does not hold public events, never in democratic history has a president's voice been heard as little as the libertarian. To find out what he thinks you have to go to social network X: “History will remember with honor all those who understood the historical context and chose to end the privileges of caste and the corporate republic. “We hope to have the same greatness on voting day in particular, moving forward to the Senate.”
The next steps of the omnibus law will find Milei between Israel and the Vatican, where he will visit Pope Francis. Until recently they hated each other, today they meet and prepare a photo of harmony. And Milei is accused of not knowing how to do politics. The truth is that he sent to Congress a law that was a mixed bag, something never seen before, and he is close to taking a law that, combined with the DNU, gives him a margin of action far above what professional politicians would have expected a couple of months ago. With an extra addition: seven years ago, the Argentine Congress was attacked with 14 tons of stones by hard-left organizations. Mauricio Macri governed, who did not know how to handle the matter and never recovered from that impact.. Milei, aware of this, exacerbated the cultural battle and, led by his former rival and now Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, deployed a shocking security operation so that the axis of politics was in Congress, and not in the streets.