DNU in the spotlight, the fight that is coming with the governors and Menem at the center of the debate

The governors rehearsed on Friday night, in some hallway talk in Congress, their first position before the Javier Milei turn to throw in the towel, abandon the strategy of confrontation and admit the need for some agreement. It has an immediate urgency: to stop the intention of Senate opponents to repeal DNU 70. It is the only program that remains standing and it is already heeled by the protections that Justice has issued.

It also faces a Congress that recovered, since Friday, the power to propose projects that may have majorities to be sanctioned. From amendments to the attempted reforms of DNU 70, to protections for provincial financing funds. Going through moratoriums – Sergio Massa already proposed one before leaving the government – and virtuous updates to pensions. It won’t be long before the Deputies a majority is formedmade up of the dialogue blocs – radical, Hacemos, part of the PRO, provincial – and the Peronist opposition, which imposes a new agenda.

In that midnight contact Martín Llaryora, Rogelio Frigerio, Ignacio Torres, Sergio Ziliotto and some others exchanged impressions about what for them is a victory. The Government identifies them as adversaries, but asks them to dialogue. They are going to counterattack with a serious condition: if the key is the distribution of taxes, that the Government admits the underlying debate that is the recomposition of the participatory mapto return to the original format or, in any case, discuss it again in a new law.

Admitting a thorough review of the system implies discussing the distribution of primary co-participation. That has been impossible since the Constitutional Reform of 1994, which made it mandatory in a transitional clause, because the Nation has refused to open the piggy bank and share its own. On the contrary, he has always taken advantage of it to make it grow.

Now they rule new conditions: a weak government, the weakest since the last 40 years, that has no party or team, no program or territories, and faces a strong Congress that made it bite the dust with the Omnibus Law, and that revels in the rejection of the DNU in the Senate. If the primary is discussed, it is not difficult to find a solution. But the government will have to give up power and money, not continue fighting for more power and more money.

In it origin of the current systemthe Nation was left with 42.34%; 56.66% was distributed among the provinces automatically, and 1% was reserved for the National Treasury Contribution Fund (ATN) (Law 23548 of 1988). Over the years, successive amendments increased the quota administered by the Nation to the current 70%, leaving 30% to the provinces. That difference is fueled by bills and also by politics. The Nation can decide, with the management of 70% of the resources, what is contracted, with whom it is contracted and when they are paid. In 2023, according to economist Nadin Argañaraz, of the national collection without social security, the Nation was left with 57% and the provinces with 43%.

According to the former radical deputy jose pastorithat updates this data month by month, The provinces received 39.5% in January of the total co-shareable tax collection. With the fiscal pacts of the ’90s and following, that sum fell to 32/34%. It was recovered in the last decade due to court rulings and the fiscal consensus of the Macri administration. The current distribution does not include taxes that have a special distribution regime, such as the fuel tax or non-shareable sums, such as the check tax, the PAIS tax, or social security contributions. If everything collected is added up, The provinces receive only 30% of what is collected and the Nation 70%according to Pastori.

This is the fight waged by the provinces – The Reality, Subcomandante Marcos (guglear) would say – and that legal fiction that is the Nation. Since the sanction of the norm, the majority of the governments have been Peronist. This force imposes a format of fiscal unitarism that confronts the provinces. The menemist thesisWhat crystallized the management of Domingo Cavallo in the ’90s, and which inspired the current administration, is that the provinces are the basis of what Milei calls the “rotten system.”

Milei invokes Menem as his inspiring number, but The construction of the unitary and spending State is owed to that same Menem. that collapsed. We should not ask politicians for coherence, and even less so in a liquid society, in which parallels do not meet even in infinity. In the text of the so-called May Pact, he proposes discussing a sharing regime that surpasses “the current extortionate model.” For the provinces, in the current scheme, the one who extorts is the Nation. Milei believes that the provinces, which are where people live, are the ones who extort money. There is an immense distance between what each other sees.. It is typical of rigid thinking to propose that these changes be, in addition, “forever.” It is a phrase of zero degree of significance. Nothing in politics lasts forever. Or everything is, it doesn’t matter.

The provinces respond that they have managed to manage until 2023 with a fiscal surplus, following the rules of the game proposed by the Nation. Milei has been a victim in these three months of what he calls the “principle of revelation.” It is the corny name of the old method of hitting the pig until the owner appears. He sent the bullet-laws so that his adversaries would appear and he could identify and kill them. The maneuver revealed to the governors and legislators that What Milei wants is not to change Argentinabut to obtain extraordinary powers from Congress to manage the money that goes to the provinces.

In that informal talk between leaders of the dialogue fringe, a first consensussomething difficult to unify because each province has different needs: no one is willing to admit the condition that Milei placed on the so-called May Pact, before approving the Omnibus Law. Pick up that dead man, it’s the message to Milei. The Government must make the effort to ensure that Congress does not come upon them.

He also has the responsibility to demonstrate that this is more than just rhetorical nonsense, calling to defend things that are not in danger, such as freedom and property. Who would be against fiscal balance or a balanced and sustainable provisional regime for all? Milei has spoken to you with your pocket and wants you to respond with your heart. The governors turn the formula upside down: they have appealed to their hearts, but they will respond with their pockets.

Milei has the opportunity this week to test her cheer up to agree. One is the response of his Government to the summons approved by the DNU Bicameral Commission, for officials to explain the reasons for the need and urgency of the text of DNU 70. Until this Sunday That answer was not clear., whether or not those officials will go, when and at what time. Nor if the President will hand over his officials so that they can experience a repetition of the hearings that took place in Deputies for the omnibus law. He has said that Congress is a rat’s nest and that it is part of the rotten scheme he wants to attack.

A He has a second chance in Puerto Madryn this Thursday. The league of Patagonian governors has invited him to the session of the Assembly of Governors of the Treaty of Patagonia. The leaders of the region have been working on the constitution of a bloc since before taking office on December 10. In September 2023 they held a summit in Ushuaia in which they conspired to create a regional space in Congress, which may have 30 deputies and 18 senators in the defense of regional jurisdictions, above partisan differences.

The leaders will be there ignacio torres (Chubut), Claudio Vidal (Santa Cruz), Rolando Figueroa (Neuquen), Sergio Ziliotto (The Pampa), Alberto Weretilneck (Black River) and Gustavo Melella (Land of Fire). They have summoned the legislators of those provinces and assume that there will be absences from La Libertad Avanza and some sectors of the PRO.

This forum was born in Santa Rosa in 1996, after the clause in favor of regionalization that appears in the 1994 Constitution. It has density because it was born from highly fought regional projects in the era of governors like Horacio Massaccesi, Rubén Martín or Néstor Kirchner. They resisted Eduardo Duhalde’s attempts to include Buenos Aires in that group. Only Carmen de Patagones’ party was admitted as an observer member without the right to vote. Marín won the fight to enter the club, because the southerners resisted him.

The governors argued all weekend. a statement advancing his response to Milei’s call an agreement. It includes, among other topics, the serious reconsideration of co-participation, opening the discussion of the primary. They decided to suspend publicity of the document to allow Milei to accept without feeling corseted in a hostile photo.

The position of the Patagonians includes the creation of a regional energy company -its own Cammesa to negotiate resources-, the provincialization of the hydroelectric plants when the concessions end and the recovery of the management of the mature hydrocarbon areas, which YPF has already announced that it will leave to focus on Vaca Muerta.

Milei effectively begins to exercise his presidential mandate this Monday, because Congress entered its regular session. The Government no longer has the privilege that Congress can only discuss initiatives proposed by the Executive. The Government wasted that power, almost a privilege to control any situation, with the frivolity of putting the country in a state of permanent assembly around the bullet projects (DNU 70 and omnibus law). He did not surprise that Milei repeated the call for agreements, just as all presidents in difficulty have done.

There are plenty of anecdotes about the enthusiasm it produced in society every time a president with water up to his neck called on all sectors to move forward to the music of the agreements. Until Cristina de Kirchner, when he reigned in 2011 with 54% of the votes, believed that he would gain oxygen for the new mandate. He called for a political agreement that excited even the most stubborn opposition.

Elisa Carrió, who usually sees her, warned them that it was useless. It was a rhetorical agreement, which Peronism dynamited with measures that led to failure. A few months after that call for an agreement, they discovered the ruinous nationalization of Repsol’s shares in YPF and imposed the stocks. That ruling party accumulated political, cultural, judicial and electoral defeats that displaced it from power in 2015.

The only way to build power is to give up power. Something that Milei does not do until now. It’s not easy for her, she has so little power that she doesn’t even have enough to show. Hence the marathon of pretenses with which she manages, in the illusion that discourse is above reality. A technical fallacy that proves that the government also delays in semiotics. If this were not the case, Peronism would not have obtained 44% of the votes in the runoff, nor would it maintain a wall blocking the ruling party with 100 deputies and almost 40 senators – they are the ones who come together in these hours to reject the DNU 70 -.