Argentina has experienced this week a preview of what may come in the coming months under the mandate of the far-right Javier Milei. The eccentric anarcho-capitalist president managed late on Friday to get the Chamber of Deputies to approve a very brushed version of his ambitious and controversial law of Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of Argentines, an omnibus norm with which he intended to advance a single-handedly completed most of his ultraliberal government program. The marathon debate began on Wednesday and lasted three days in a Congress besieged by the police and with serious riots in the streets of Buenos Aires that resulted in 18 arrests.
Although this is apparently Milei's first legislative victory since he took office on December 10, it is actually not so. Firstly, because he has had to renounce the majority of the articles of his bill, which initially consisted of 664 articles and finally ended at 224. The president only has without fissures the 38 deputies of his party, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), of the 257 that make up the Lower House. In addition, it has the almost unrestricted support of the 37 legislators of the right-wing Republican Proposal (Pro), the formation led by former president Mauricio Macri, many of whose cadres are part of the Government, starting with the Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, former presidential candidate. who came third in last year's elections.
The law was generally approved by 144 votes in favor and 109 against, evidencing that the so-called crack or polarization is still in force, although Milei has managed to get closer to sectors of the centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR) – historically anti-Peronist –, compromising on many of their demands that they accept part of their bill. Also voting in favor were regionalist deputies and conservative Peronists far from the main opposition group, the Peronist Union for the Homeland (UxP), which has 99 legislators, including the Kirchnerists.
Furthermore, the vote in particular – article by article – was postponed until Tuesday, because there are regionalist and radical deputies who supported the law who still aspire to achieve unmet demands.
And then, the norm still has to be ratified by the Senate, where LLA is also in the minority and where another tough negotiation is expected in exchange for more resignations from Milei.
The populist leader, who won the elections by proposing to drastically cut the welfare state with his chainsaw, was forced, to approve the law, to renounce a good part of his tax reform, the cuts to retirees, the announced privatization of all public companies – only 27 of 41 state companies will go to the private sector, and the oil company YPF, nationalized by Kirchnerism, will be saved for the moment – or his claim that Congress grants him exceptional powers to legislate by decree for two years.
For now, Milei will have these exceptional powers for only one year, which does not bode well considering this week's incidents on the streets in the middle of the southern summer vacation season in January and February. In fact, the president forced these extraordinary sessions of Congress during the holidays because he knows that the economic situation after the March slope will be explosive – inflation is already climbing to 211% – and that the pickets, union protests and cacerolazos They have only just begun.
