The opposition refuses to eliminate the PASO

The chief of staff, Guillermo Francos, began to pull strings to gather wills around one objective: to eliminate the open, simultaneous and mandatory primaries (PASO), the mechanism that the Argentine electoral system adopted since 2011 to settle candidacies within coalitions. To do this, he would need the support of an important part of the friendly opposition that collaborated in the sanction of the Bases Law, and that to ratify his cooperative spirit went to Tucumán to be cold at the signing of the May Pact. However, the different spaces of the “opofriendly” zone have already made it known to the coordinating minister that they are not going to help in this purpose because, basically, it doesn’t suit them. Given the uncertainty of how the electoral board will be ordered, with a ruling party that is devouring – as it already demonstrated last year – the same electorate of the extinct Together for Change (JxC), closing oneself to the possibility of resolving the candidacies in an open internal election would be to buy a problem for free and give an advantage to Peronism’s rivals. The PRO, which is torn internally between two positions (with a cost still difficult to calculate) to define the type of relationship with the ruling party, is in any variant the space closest politically and ideologically to La Libertad Avanza (LLA) and the natural thing would be for both to walk towards a common electoral front. The Minister of National Security, Patricia Bullrich, intends to go further and begin to merge the structures, something that gives goosebumps to the classic Macrism that warns of the danger of a liquefaction of its own historical identity. It is clear that Bullrich is already part of the ruling party and throughout his career he was never afraid to change his political brand. On the other hand, Mauricio Macri is the founder of the PRO and under no circumstances would he accept burying the political party capital that he worked so hard to build over the years to subsume himself in a new “libertarian” identity led by Milei.Be that as it may, not even the former president can ignore that there is a latent tension in his decision to sustain the relative autonomy of the Government.He knows that the space of the right is culturally hegemonized by Milei and that looking towards the center, where he would find again the UCR, the Civic Coalition and other actors who were part of the failed experience of Cambiemos, would expose him to a kind of “non-place” devoured by polarization. Whether Macri’s position or Bullrich’s prevails in the PRO, in short, the yellow party is on its way to forming a coalition with LLA, so ultimately the struggle in the party is for control of the pen with which the candidacies will be negotiated with the ruling party. If the coalition with LLA is confirmed, holding the PASO will allow the PRO to present candidates in all those districts in which the ruling party intends to postpone it. It is known that the government wants to head all the electoral lists with its own candidates and in some cases, as in the province of Buenos Aires, threatens to include extra-party candidates only from fifth place, something that would be humiliating for the party of Macri.La UCR belongs to a second ring of alliances for the government. The relationship, therefore, is less fluid and more forced. The political tradition of the centennial party clashes with that of Milei, beyond the fact that during the debate for the Bases Law it was not so noticeable and it was necessary to have a very sharp vision to play the “game of differences”. In this context, radicalism seems doomed to travel the “wide avenue in the middle”, which at some point Sergio Massa explored without luck before returning to the Peronist fold. If the PRO decided to go to an alliance with LLA, the UCR would lose its strong ally of recent years, the one it faithfully served between 2015 and 2019, a service for which some malicious glances foisted on it the title of “caboose”. In any case, between the ruling party and the Peronist opposition, a significant number of political expressions were swarming, some of national scope such as the UCR and the Civic Coalition, and others provincial such as Cordobaism and Santa Fe socialism, in addition to references of the bloc of deputies of Hacemos Coalición Federal such as Miguel Pichetto, Emilio Monzó, Nicolás Massot, Margarita Stolbizer and Florencio Randazzo.To this universe is added a renowned exile of the PRO such as Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, who is looking for revenge and is already exploring agreements with the radical senator Martín Lousteau.This dispersed and atomized range, in which no figure appears that significantly detaches himself from the rest by his own weight, almost certainly requires the instrument of the PASO to find in the competition a leadership and potenciarlo.la only acronym that all these spaces of the so-called “dialogue” opposition are open to sacrificing is the final “O” of the PASO, which refers to the mandatory nature of the open primaries. In recent statements, the head of the emancipated Civic Coalition bloc, Juan Manuel López, said that the PASO are “an ideal system, not like the internal party registry closed to settle candidacies.” He recalled, however, that his political force presented a project so that primaries are no longer mandatory, “that is, that the party or alliance that carries a single list does not have to go to the PASO and that citizens are not obliged to go to vote in the PASO.” But it is important that the primaries of the parties or alliances are open, not with a party registry, but that independent citizens can vote, because the registries are very “fixed.” It is good that they are simultaneous, independent and with guarantees from the State, because the political parties do not have the capacity to organize the election on their own, for a broad election where they can vote independently,” he added López.La same position is shared by former PROs Monzó and Massot, as well as most of the members of the Hacemos Coalición Federal bloc. with the exception of Pichetto, who did show himself aligned with the Government.The Santa Fe socialists Esteban Paulón and Mónica Fein, who are part of that bench, categorically reject the elimination of the PASO, as confirmed by the former in dialogue with Noticias Argentinas. We believe that if progress is made in the single paper ballot system, costs will be greatly reduced and there is no need to eliminate the PASO, which on the other hand is a mechanism that allows minorities in political parties to have representation that otherwise is often denied to them,” Paulón said. or all of them, are against it, and this was confirmed to NA by sources close to Rodrigo de Loredo, the head of the bloc. Curiously, radical deputies who respond to other political terminals within the centennial party (Facundo Manes and Lousteau) coincide in this aspect with the Cordovan one. And the Left Front, although it was critical when the mechanism of the PASO was approved in 2009 at the behest of the government of Cristina Kirchner, will not vote for the government of Javier Milei a political reform that also hides other intentions, such as eliminating public financing of political parties.

Original source in Spanish