Less than a month after a landslide victory in the country, the opposition is playing a role. Is it just a war of egos and ambitions? Or perhaps there are different political projects behind the apparent and frivolous differences? Does the new generation of radical politicians practice the old custom of party internism even worse? A bit of all of that exists in the verbal fights (and incredible boxing gymnastics) of the last few days. Although all the leaders of Together for Change swear and perjure that the unity of the opposition coalition is guaranteed, the truth is that the image also has value in the construction of politics. And the image and the disappointment of recent days are easily palpable in important social sectors. They discouraged and disappointed. Such is the result of the appearance of the new leaders of radicalism.
It is fair and timely to specify two situations. The recent embarrassment did not feature the entire Together for Change alliance. That coalition is made up of Pro, the Civic Coalition and radicalism, which was the exclusive protagonist of the political scandal. In Pro there are differences –of course not–, especially between Mauricio Macri and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, which also participates Patricia bullrich, but they are silent. NAdie speaks badly of the other in public nor are there, for now, exposed fractures. The Civic Coalition recognizes the strong leadership of Elisa Carrió and it is impossible to imagine in that party a schism motivated only by personal ambitions. In Pro only a sad celebration of a good electoral victory was noticed, nothing more than because one of its leaders, Rodríguez Larreta, did not achieve in the Capital and in the province of Buenos Aires the great electoral results that would have made him the undisputed presidential candidate for 2023 for Together for Change. Rodríguez Larreta’s personal disappointment (his presidential ambition is already an obsession) allowed the ruling party in the two most exposed electoral districts of the country to create the sophism of “we win by losing.” and that, at the same time, it is organizing the second popular celebration in the iconic Plaza de Mayo. It will do so on the occasion of the 38th anniversary since the democratic restoration, on December 10, as if it had been their own conquest. Kirchnerism is incapable of solving the country’s great problems or even understanding them, but it is extremely astute at creating a discourse and rhetoric that take things for granted that never happened.
The second situation that must be established is that the last elections did not change the Government, but only the relationship of forces in Congress. Kirchnerism continues to rule. He governs Justice and also administers public injury. We already saw it with the hilarious ruling of an oral court that dismissed without prior trial Cristina Kirchner, their children and businessmen Lázaro Báez and Cristóbal López for money laundering in hotels and buildings in Hotesur and Los Sauces, owned by the Kirchners since the dead patriarch of the family lived. Just yesterday, the Minister of Justice, Martín Soria, kicked the Supreme Court of Justice in plenary session during a visit that the judges had planned as a courtesy. One of the court ministers had the impulse to get up and leave the meeting due to the violent verbal charge from Soria. Finally, he did not.
In the next few days (the 16 of this month, to be precise) the sentence of the oral court that is trying Cristóbal López and his partner will be known, Fabián de Sousa, for defrauding the State. They kept taxes that they withheld from customers when they sold gasoline to them. They were simple retention agents, but With that money that they did not transfer to the State, they built a business empire. In recent days, the media of López and De Sousa slandered and defamed the journalist Hugo Alconada Mon already THE NATION. Alconada Mon was the journalist who investigated the Hotesur case and who gave a public account of what López and De Sousa did with the money that belonged to the State, not theirs. The first and most iridescent investigation by Alconada Mon on the management of these businessmen was published in 2013; Any association of the journalist with incredible macrista maneuvers, according to the defamation of López and De Sousa, is a slander that does not even respect the chronology of the events. Pure lies. Alconada Mon suffered persecution by the intelligence services of all governments. It also happens that a recent investigation by Alconada Mon, published last Sunday, revealed that 40 AFIP officials were punished and demoted for having investigated the allegedly corrupt practices of the Kirchners and López y De Sousa. The intense campaign against Alconada Mon may have other audiences: the judges who are about to decide whether these businessmen are guilty or innocent. The harassment of the journalist would be an advance to the judges of what would happen to them if they ruled against López and De Sousa.
In this landscape, in which journalism is outraged and judges are pressured, the opposition wastes time talking about itself. The rupture of the radical bloc of the Chamber of Deputies was unnecessary, because simply the group that split lost the internal election that tried to displace the leadership of Mario Negri. He did not accept defeat. It was an ugly failure: 27 votes against them and 12 in favor; This dozen is made up of those who left to make a separate block. The visible head of the fracture is the radical deputy Emiliano Yacobitti, which never topped a winning list. Yacobitti, who comes from Franja Morada, has a habit of breaking what he cannot win; he did the same at a recent Radical Youth meeting. It is a terrible practice of the worst radicalism of 50 years ago.
Yacobitti would not exist if it weren’t for the fact that he has a godfather: Enrique “Coti” Nosiglia, which has influenced radicalism for 35 years. Nosiglia never stood for an election and therefore never won an election. Its influence is economic, money that comes from companies that are not known, and his custom is to stay in the shadows about politic. Together with the Peronist Jose Luis Manzano created in the 80s a generation of political managers, those who manage money that is not seen in public life. It should be noted that Manzano later devoted himself, at least, exclusively to business; his influence on current politics is nil. Nosiglia continues to coexist with politics and business. Nosiglia is Yacobitti’s “boss”, but he is also the one behind the senator Martin Lousteau, a main protagonist of the fights of the last days. The current national senator, Lousteau has enormous self-esteem and enormous ambition. His relationship with radicalism is ambivalent; When he was a deputy, he left and entered the radical bloc as if it had a revolving door. Lousteau stood for election, led as a candidate for senator the 2017 elections in the Capital and won them. That differentiates him from Nosiglia and Yacobitti. But he was also Cristina Kirchner’s Minister of Economy and, as such, he signed resolution 125, which directly confiscated money from soy producers. That resolution unleashed Cristina Kirchner’s losing war with the countryside in 2008. Radicals reminded Lousteau of that antecedent during recent brawls.
Another exponent of this disruptive trend is Cordoba Rodrigo de Loredo, with more ego than scrolls in politics. He was on the list he headed for the Senate Luis Judge in the Cordovan intern of Together for Change and that he won. Yacobitti, De Loredo, Lousteau and, of course, Nosiglia, were trying to displace Negri, who in recent years was the leader of the radical bloc in Diputados and coordinator of the Juntos por el Cambio interblock. Negri was elected national deputy for Córdoba in 2019 with 52 percent of the votes and has a mandate until 2023. He lost the recent intern with Judge and De Loredo (more with Judge, who was the first candidate for national senator, than with De Loredo ), but he has an unchangeable mandate as a national deputy. Negri was an excellent leader of the radical bloc and the exchange-rate interblock; He has a long parliamentary experience and was never carried away by the seduction attempts of Kirchnerism. Nor by those of Sergio Massa, which is more subtle in its efforts to co-opt. Why would Yacobitti or De Loredo be better parliamentary leaders than Negri? Only, perhaps, because they won an intern or because they have the protection of the omnipresent Nosiglia? In such a case, does the senator Louis naidenoff, a good leader of the Juntos por el Cambio interbloque in the Senate (he will now be replaced by Alfredo Cornejo), should not have that position because he always loses in his province, Formosa, before the eternal Peronist leader Gildo Insfran?
Carrió often says that in Juntos por el Cambio the fundamental difference is between pan-republicans and pan-Peronists. It does not refer, of course, to the republican Peronists that it expresses Michelangelo Pichetto, who starred in a fundamental and definitive change in his political life. Rather, it refers to those who frequent Massa, among which includes Rodríguez Larreta, Yacobitti and Nosiglia himself. Never before has such a strong public complaint been made against Nosiglia as that made by Carrió in a recent ceremony for the 20 years of the Civic Coalition. Macri, Rodríguez Larreta and Bullrich were sitting in the front row. Macri later tweeted several paragraphs of Carrió’s speech. Strictly speaking, Macri and Carrió were again united by the common rejection of the approaches of some of their own with Massa.
Deep down, the concern among the main leaders of Juntos por el Cambio is not confined only to the aberrations of some radicals, willing to turn their backs on society. The deepest concern is that the numbers are almost even in the Chamber of Deputies. Together for Change has 116 deputies and, at the time of voting, the Frente de Todos has 117. The ruling party has one more, but Sergio Massa, president of the body, does not vote, except in the event of a tie. The alliances of one and the other with the rest of the parties are hesitant and ephemeral to reach the 129 deputies that are needed to have quorum own. Anyone can reach that decisive number. Those who have the state in their hands have more resources than the opposition. Divisions, political narcissism, and unfettered ambitions among certain opponents stain the entire opposition. and it places society without alternatives, dangerously without options.