Macri and Lousteau: sleeping with the enemy – 23/02/2019

Recent history tends to show, better than nothing, the arguments of the current decadence. In the month of October Twenty years of the last radical president elected at the polls will be celebrated. Fernando de la Rua was the fifth of them after Hipólito Yrigoyen, Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear, Arturo Illia and Raúl Alfonsín, the first to defeat Peronism. It is well known that this mandate did not end well and ended two years earlier than planned with the 2001 epidemic. However, other experiments have been so futile that even the trauma of the premature departure of De Rua was suffocated.

In 2003 the UCR has hit the bottom of its nightmare taking as presidential candidate Leopoldo Moreau, today a secondary member of the Brancaleone de Cristina Army. They got 2.3% of the votes across the country, the lowest percentage of the party with 129 years of history. Y in 2007, they were the van of Roberto Lavagna's post, who took Gerardo Morales, now powerful governor of Jujuy, as vice-presidential candidate. Voters worked a little better because they won 17% of the vote and located MPs, senators and a large number of mayors. But the experiment ends in failure when, three months later, Lavagna tries to get caught in the arms and takes a picture of Néstor Kirchner in the Quinta de Olivos to resume his Peronist DNA.

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The year 2011 does not bring pleasant memories to the UCR. Ricardo Alfonsín proved that genetics do not inherit votes and finished third with just over 11%, far behind Cristina Kirchner and Socialist Hermes Binner. Then came the experience of the Frente Cambiemos with Mauricio Macri who now finds the radicals as Minority partners in power with three governors and three ministers, in addition to a good number of lawmakers. The novelty in the game of Alem is that many of its leaders believe that it's time to confront the president in the primary elections to be held in August.

The shooting of the dollar last year and the persistent fall of the presidential image embolden above all those who have remained on the periphery of the party in recent years. There does not seem to be an undisputed candidate like Ernesto Sanz was in 2015 and that's why the eyes start to fall on Martin Lousteau, the former Minister of the Economy of Cristina who had joined the UCR in 2017. Two years ago, he had founded his own party (Evolution), with which he had almost prevented the election of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta at the head of the government of Buenos Aires.

Up there the story. Now, what begins to be written is the troubling saga of the relationship between Macri and Lousteau. The President invited him to join the delegation with which he visited India and Vietnam. And the deputy from Buenos Aires was sent in an interview in full trip with the arguments by which he thinks that there should be a primary election in Cambiemos. He did not announce his candidacy, but it was clear that he was talking to a trainee between them two.

The challenge scandalized Casa Rosada and was celebrated by radicals who dream of coping with Macri in an inmate. To foreigners, like the son of Alfonsín, and to some initiates like the governor of Mendoza, Alfredo Cornejo. The issue has worked like a flash in the storm of power. Who invited Lousteau to tour the Far East? The answer explains a little the state of the governmental coalition with which the macristas refuse to be called coalition.

"The guests came to the suggestion of Emilio Monzó", it is the argument that they use near the president. And they blame Lousteau 's discursive excess for the lack of attention of the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, wishing to anticipate the end of his term and to go to Madrid as a "political party". ambbadador of Argentina in Spain. Marcos Peña, who has been facing Monzó since 2015, took advantage of the situation to meet Buenos Aires' Security Minister Cristian Ritondo on Thursday and confirmed that Macri was the first candidate for the province's deputation to the elections. The message was clear. Monzó already has a successor.

Of course, there are those of Macrismo who swear that it is directly Macri who made the decision to take Lousteau to Taj Mahal. And they read it as a little personal revenge from the president of his friend, Rodríguez Larreta, with whom he has a nuanced relationship of affection but also of skill. It turns out that Lousteau is Larreta's main opponent in the city. These are things that Macri usually does to disorient people and strangers. Fun things like that Send him a message The former secretary of Buenos Aires Culture, Darío Loperifido, congratulated him for the chirping campaign that the old sushi warms in social networks, almost always with Horacio as the recipient of his corrosive ironies.

Be that as it may, in politics, darts usually come back like a boomerang. Invited by Macri or Monzó, Lousteau did not wait to leave the beautiful Emirates plane in which they went to present themselves as a possible candidate. But as a rival of Macri and not Rodriguez Larreta, because the challenge is to explore whether there is room for him to face the main posture of Cambiemos. The president, focused on the possibility of his reelection, did not like the bravado of the economist with whom he has good personal relations, that he appointed ambbadador to Washington and he resigned two months before taking over Donald Trump. Some officials of the macrista even thought that Lousteau could even be the companion of the presidential formula. If this hypothesis were viable, it would be buried between New Delhi and Hanoi. "These are the risks of sleeping with the enemy"says an experienced radical who loves them both.

But challenging an inmate or seriously addressing a trainee are very different issues. After Daniel Kronenberg's triumph over Javier Mac Allister at La Pampa, the radicals started to get excited and evaluate their real possibilities of facing Macri. Ramón Mestre ignored the pleas of the macrismo and confront Mario Negri for the governorship of Córdoba. He is accompanied by almost all the provincial UCR aircraft in front of a Negri who has a better appearance in the polls and who enjoys the full support of the government and Elisa Carrió. What will happen if Mestre defeats the candidate of Casa Rosada in the district where Macri won 75% of the votes in the 2015 elections? It would be another blow for the president and a way, perhaps without return, towards a wild primary election.

"Inner sport is our favorite sport but radicals sometimes exaggerate and we do not realize that Macri is seriously challenging power with Peronism", warns one of the co-religionists who best keeps the ways with the PRO girl. The moment of truth will be played at the next national convention, which will be held in late April and promises to be a volcano in the middle of the electoral process. Morales postulated Jujuy, a province where he could best contain the most exalted radicals. Ricardo Colombi has offered to Corrientes and it is clear that the discussion will be hot. At the Gualeguaychú convention in 2015, Sanz and Morales won enough votes to support Macri's presidential candidacy. But they stole dozens of chairs and pineapples during the democratic debate. Several people prepare the helmet and train the muscles for the upcoming discussion.

What most radicals recognize is that Lousteau does not excite them too much as a candidate. But that the internal challenge may be useful for Macri to recognize them in Change the place they think they deserve. Negotiation between Macri and Cornejo will be key, the president of the UCR, to define the situation. Angry, raging, most radicals admit they have no better option than to accompany the battle for presidential reelection. "With the devaluation, Macri saw the abyss and it was very clear that he wanted to continue," clarifies with respect one of the radicals who have suffered the least from the early departures of Alfonsin and De la Rua. But it will be very difficult for party moderates to contain the fury of those going for the trainee.

From the lessons of the adolescent country, the Alliance born at the end of the 90s paid, like no other political sector, the internism of its members. The disagreements between Rua, Alfonsín, Chacho Alvarez and Elisa Carrió accelerated the debacle that Peronism experienced with the sin of irresponsibility. The result of all this nonsense is that 51% of Argentines are below the poverty line. The story of the upcoming presidential elections will also depend on how the leaders of the Cambiemos Front settle their pending accounts. Macri, Lilita, the radicals, Lousteau. As the economy trembles and takes time to calm down, the company worries to check if those to whom they gave their vote have returned to the learning curve.