Some of the ministers closest to Alberto Fernández describe with an ironic concept the new plan with which the President faces the critical and constant siege from the Kirchners. “To pretendent demency”they explain with an effective joke smile.
The strategy is inspired by the reflections and teachings of another leader who had to manage an ally in partnership with Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, but who at the same time was punished by them with statements or actions against him. They are Daniel Scioli, former vice president of Néstor Kirchner; twice governor of Buenos Aires with Cristina in the Casa Rosada; and that even, despite everything, he ended up being chosen as a candidate for the Presidency for space K in the 2019 elections.
“The Scioli style” is now the course that Fernández decided to follow. It is easy to understand but complex to comply with. It should be exercised with restraint. Consists in never reply to criticism or actions executed by the K against him.
Scioli met several times with the President and advised him to put his method into practice. The current ambassador to Brazil meets with Fernández more than transcends. Although he did not agree to comment on his influence on the President regarding how to coexist with allies who work to lacerate their own leader almost as if they were the real opposition leadership, Clarion He was able to learn that in the meetings that the ambassador had with Fernández in the Quinta de Olivos, both exchanged experiences on that custom to which the Kirchners had accustomed them to suffer.
The President now does as Scioli to avoid the attrition of fights that he prefers to keep encapsulated. The vice surprised him by fracturing the ruling bloc in the Senate. The Head of State found out about the news through the media and was angry. He still doesn’t speak to the vice, even though there is some communication channel between them.
Cristina Kirchner with Senator Martín Doñate, appointed as representative of the Senate in the Council of the Judiciary.
Although Fernandez baffled part of his team stopping the changes in the Government, he is increasingly convinced that the “Scioli effect” generates confusion among the K.
“She has her own agenda. We don’t have to follow her. She is wrong. She is further and further away from the demands of society, ”describes the President in private. But she is silent.
At the same time, he makes gestures that he knows irritate the K and he seeks to install in society that he does not fight, that if there is a confrontation with the Kirchners it is because they provoke it. “100 percent Scioli style”.
Among other examples, this week it was striking that the Head of State shared an act in Neuquén with one of the “camporistas” who rebelled against his authority and against that of his immediate boss, the Minister of Economy, Martin Guzmán. The wayward one whom the president approached without reproach is the undersecretary of Electric Power, Federico Basualdo, defended by the vice president when the head of the Palacio de Hacienda tried to kick him out because he does not accept his orders regarding how the rise in electricity rates should be implemented. public services.
Of course: at the act in Neuquén, Minister Guzmán, who was in Washington at the time negotiating with the IMF, appeared prominently via Zoom.
Who was more irritated? Fernández for posing in a photo with Basualdo? Or the vice president because of the presidential support that the Economy Minister continues to receive, a leader that both she and her son, Máximo de ella, want to see out of the government immediately? These are details that matter only to the protagonists of this story.
Society, meanwhile, needs answers to the increasingly complex problems of the national situation.
Fernández (Alberto) is viewed with increasing mistrust by the PJ governors, as well as by his government team, because he appears totally passive in the face of “Christinism”, which he threatened to show with undoubted gestures that the one in charge is he.
“Cristina’s fights drag us all”, he usually says in front of officials and leaders who visit him in Olivos or La Rosada. The president has reserved meetings with leaders of various political spaces that would draw attention if they were officially confirmed. Old enemies who today are governors, mayors, or trade unionists of the CGT, are received by Fernández and assure that they still do not rule out a reaction from him in the face of the attempt to take over the Kirchner government.
The last act in the Casa Rosada also seemed to be dedicated to the Kirchners, both because of its content and because of who starred in it. The Head of State sat next to him the resister of the K, Guzmán, in the White Room of the Government headquarters. It was when both communicated that the State would pay bonuses of different amounts to monotributistas, retirees, but also to those who do not manage to enter the labor system. The Federal Emergency Income (IFE) returned, something that the K claimed for months. It is no coincidence that those who agreed to this measure were three of the officials whom La Cámpora, and Vice Cristina, are suspicious of: Economy Minister Guzmán; that of Social Development, Juan Zabaleta; and the head of Labor, Claudio Moroni.
Ministers Juan Zabaleta, of Social Development; Martín Guzmán, from Economy, and Claudio Moroni, from Labor.
An official photo portrayed the conclave of these three officials working together, something that irritated the K, according to official sources.
Scioli is in Buenos Aires. He met with almost all the important ministers of the Government. With leaders of historical Peronism. And he is in permanent communication with the newest Cabinet official for the “old” Peronism, with whom he has special personal sympathy: Guzmán. The minister called him to give him details of his tour of the United States.
Scioli himself, no longer in executive positions and without a backpack of management responsibilities, let loose in various interviews and described the “Scioli style” in the face of the Kirchner’s attacks. It was not a subject that he accepted to speak before the press. Now yes.
“They did everything to me. I had to watch every word I said. But I learned that if you get caught up in what they say, you lose your mind. You have to let them talk and that’s it. They killed me in an act or by means and I responded with what I knew how to do. He took measures for the people of Buenos Aires. Or he did a free recital with 200,000 people who were going to listen to the Pimpinellas”, Scioli would say today, according to sources who frequented him recently.
The ambassador in Brazil - these days dedicated to promoting the export of Argentine pistachios and raisins to that country - recounted how he governed, and seemed to be talking about the current moment of the Fernández administration, during the months of 2019 in which the Today, the vice president presented her book “Sinceramente”, in which she criticized him again: “The tensions between the National Government and the province did not make management easy for me. Many times I think they filled his head, possibly some of the kids from La Cámpora”.
Fernandez will try to follow that plan. What he thinks of the Kirchners, and what he says privately about them, he will silence in public, or deny: “Cristina is infumable”, she gets angry.
It is possible that three Buenos Aires PJ mayors with whom he met in recent days have heard him say: Alberto Descalzo, from Ituzaingó; Juan José Mussi from Berazategui and the communal chief of Florencio Varela, Julio Pereyra.
One of Cristina’s alleged insults that he did not reply to was the one she did when she said at a session of the intercontinental parliament called EuroLat2022: “Just because they put a band on you and give you a cane does not mean you have power,” he said, in what seemed like another phrase to wear down the national president.
This time, the lack of response maybe it was due to the call that one of Cristina’s most influential advisers made to a close collaborator of Alberto: “She says to convey that with that phrase she was not talking about him, but about how the President of Argentina always has more power than the most influential corporations and businessmen from the country”. The President would have accepted the explanation. But always without leaving the slightest margin for reconciliation.
The first K punishment that Scioli received seems to show Argentina’s circular problems: a few months after assuming power with Néstor Kirchner, dared to say they could raise utility ratesas discussed with the IMF.
Kirchner stopped speaking to him for several days and fired the officials who responded to his colleague in the Presidency.
The vice fell silent.
Fernandez now took their advice.
Scioli went to the Quinta de Olivos for the last time on April 2. The President invited him to his birthday.
The ambassador did not bring any gift.
Was not necessary to.
