First electoral test will face women
Women are surely the best of today’s politics. Now it’s their turn to star in the first election of 2022, a year that was expected away from the polls. Before April 15, lawyers and judges from all over the country have to elect representatives to the Council of the Judiciary, to recompose the body according to the criteria of “Balance” that the Court restored in its last ruling. If before April 15 the estates are not reintegrated in order to balance the sectors, the Council will lose legality and the justice system will be completely paralyzed. Judges and lawyers have decided that the new positions to be elected in national elections will be women - a judge of first instance, two lawyers - to meet the gender requirement imposed by current legislation in all areas of representation.
This election can decide the management of the Council until November, when new elections will be held, due to the vegetative renewal of representation. On April 6 the lawyers will choose two women, according to the regulation that the plenary session of the Council will approve this Monday. It will be the first certification since the November 2 legislative elections and will involve more than 60,000 professionals, who can only be mobilized by national political parties.
Between the judges the fight will be disputed. In the elections for the authorities of the Association of Magistrates in the last week of November, the opposition won by a narrow margin against the ruling party’s candidates. The Bordó list got 857 votes against 816 for Celeste. Just 41 votes difference. La Celeste expresses the sectors of Christianity, and this result is attributed to the benefits of the Government towards the magistrates since 2019. The date of this new election is April 7.
Parallel battle in the Senate
The Government launches a battle in Congress with a new Council law for extraordinary sessions. Waiting for the chupinazo - rocket that gives the start to the San Fermín bulls - tomorrow the block of opposition senators will hold the first meeting of the year. It will be to round out the document that the advisors of all the Cambiemos parties have prepared in that chamber. It is the decalogue that summarizes the principles that they will defend in the debate on the new format of the Judicial Council. speaking in silver, They will defend the 20 members, the balance of estates requested by the Court and the presidency of the body for the head of the Supreme Court.
The interbloc chaired by Alfredo Cornejo hosted a commission of advisers that was inspired by the projects of Mario Negri, Pablo Tonelli, Silvia Giacoppo and from Larretismo, Diego Marías. That commission, coordinated by the legislative secretary Juan Pedro Tunessi, will take the document to the National Table of Changes so that a project can be drafted in the upper house. The project of Marías, a counselor who represents the PRO of Rodríguez Larreta, who politically sanitizes the organization, runs for the sticks. It leaves it at 15 members, it takes away representation from the Government and the Supreme Court. It also takes off the political representation of Congress. The members, he proposes, will be representatives of deputies and senators, but they will not be themselves. It is audacity to detach from politics a Council from which politics expects so much. But that fact that the Court is left out may please the ruling party, which fears like the devil that one of the Supreme Court magistrates sits in the presidency of the Council.
This group has a higher court that is, like everything in life, a WhatsApp group that animates the judicial Olympus of the opposition: Negri, Ernesto Sanz, Ricardo Gil Lavedra, Gustavo Ferrari, Miguel Piedecasas, Gustavo Menna. They will rescue the final project.
Trabzons to ensure quorum
The ruling party already counts the votes to impose its own: the 17 members without a seat for the Court, according to the letter of Vilma Ibarra, Initiative writer. Peronism has 35 votes; can add the senators of Río Negro and Misiones to reach the special majority of 37 that the project requires. Be careful, 37 without Covid, which is today the quorum adjustment variable in a Congress where there are no more possibilities for remote participation. In that quorum, Peronism will try to secure the vote of María Clara del Valle Vega from La Rioja. He has played in tandem with Together for Change, but has pending a reckoning with this fringe of the opposition. She was tempted for the Personal Assets quorum, but resisted.
It is key what can happen now. In this raw taming of wills, there are some bureaucratic tricks, such as delaying the contracts of advisors and block employees, who may have dubious fidelity and transitory appointments. It’s a drama of every year, which becomes more sour when the camera composition changes. Adjusting the quorum on the side of the temporary salary is one of the scoundrels of legislative life. But with an ruling party with falling numbers, it becomes a poison for coexistence.
They try to grab the support of the “federals”
In case that is missing, there is a revision of major circuits. One is the review of loyalties in “federal” Peronism. Sergio Uñac closed, in the week when Alberto visited him (who left the infected tent), the agreement with the national government to lower three lawsuits that he had initiated against the Nation under the Macri administration. It was because the bonds that San Juan had subscribed under the ministries of Dujovne and Caputo had been sent to the reprofiling - without notifying him. Being at peace with the governors helps in the Senate - where there is also a brother of Uñac.
Another sign of unconditional support will come from Formosa, which already has the head of the caucus, Mayans, and which puts the new general director of the Yacyretá entity, Fernando de Vido. This official comes from being three times mayor of the capital of Formosa, manages the provincial highway and answers to Gildo Insfrán, president of the National Congress of the PJ. He is replacing Ignacio Barrios Arrechea, who received a royal appointment in 2019 from Cristina de Kirchner, for being the son of “Cacho” - radical governor of Misiones - and not because of his experience as a contracted entity during the government of Macri. Perhaps because he was married to a daughter of General Roberto A. Shaw, who had assignments in the south of the country. Arrechea Jr.’s wife was a schoolmate of Natalia Mercado, daughter of Alicia Kirchner and the legendary “Bombón” Mercado, an oil trade unionist and a man from the prehistory of Kirchnerist Peronism.
Because of that relationship they named him in Yacyretá, and because of the same real win now he is leaving. This de Vido clings to relations within the ruling party of the Senate, where a vote is worth a life. What remains to be proven is how far the love of the “federals” for the Peronism of the AMBA goes to mix in the judicial fight, a private objective of Christianity whose public interest remains to be proven.
contracts of discord
Minutiae of legislative life, which is sometimes animated by incidents such as those on the last day of the year, when the resigning advisors Stephen Bullrich they found their offices “shrouded” by the security of the Senate. It was the office that José Torello was going to occupy, who could not be sworn in because his party’s bloc withdrew from the premises. Those who come from Bullrich and his advisers, who will continue with Torello when he takes office, were outcasts in the corridors of the Senate. It is a coquettish area, which has an exit to Combate de los Pozos street and is in front of the office he occupied Federico Pinedo when he presided over the Senate.
The same method applies Sergio Massa in Deputies. The lower house usually dictates a holiday in January for renovations in the palace (which are being carried out). Since Eduardo Camaño was president of the Deputies, the January holiday was justified by saving energy. Julián Domínguez added a break to the contracts of commission advisers, to save them until March, when the new legislative year begins.
An inopportune test for the ruling party
It is a test that falls in turbulent times. The ruling party has not yet recovered from the defeat of November 22, when it lost more than 5 million votes and turned around a promising cycle that could excite it, after defeating Macri in 2019. The public demands what it cannot give and its Officials can’t even go on vacation without being reproached by the mobileros. The only ones they can afford are to isolate themselves due to Covid, like Alberto in Olivos or Kicillof in Chapadmalal (no one warned him how irritating it is to say in public that he isolated himself in a summer residence for officials, paid for by taxpayers).
The opposition, on the other hand, dances on the deck of the cruise ship of happiness. He accommodates the elbows in a photo in which nobody risks the main asset, the unit. That’s what the opposition minuet is all about, actually a succession of photos of who meets who. It fits better with what Jesús Rodríguez calls the “imperfect bicoalitionism” that characterizes this political cycle (document “Go fast or go far?”, 2022). It runs from one to the other, the ruling party and the opposition, the drama that this assembly of coalitions can facilitate electoral success, but it is not enough to manage effectively.
museum methodologies
The Government that is entangled in its own flags: raised the economic agenda as the main management slogan, in order to commit the opposition in its relations with the IMF. As the scenario is one of “delay” of payments and pre-default, it is a boomerang that turns against him. There is no electorate that massively rewards anyone for agreeing with the IMF. Cambiemos experienced it with the defeat of 2019; They vote for no one because they put a suppository on them. But even less does a rupture pay, as this government experienced in 2021, which spoke so much about the IMF that they voted against it.
More arrears and a default equal less confidence in the future. No matter how loud they are heard, the one who has to give confidence is the Government, and the billing window is the ballot box. The crisis of Peronism is one of method. Its leaders rehearse recipes from yesteryear in a world that has changed. The most active window of Peronism, which is Christianity, is a museum in terms of strategy. His deeds and his sayings involve old instruments, microphones, media, squares, balconies, lecterns, tweets with positions on hermetic issues, for experts, such as financial debt or judicial reform. All those instruments of yesteryear imagine a subject that no longer exists, which is the “people” according to the analogical, pre-digital description.
The phenomenon of the governments of the last decade supposes that the active subject is not the “people” but the “neighborhood”: the individuals who converse not only on the networks but in channels that have surpassed the cheap sociology of rubber shoes. That notion of “people” supposed the division between the crowd in the square and the “elite”, that enlightened avant-garde that explains and leads. A Cristina from the tweet and the Patria Institute, articulating revolutions together with Parrilli and José Mayans. It’s a wake for black and white TV. Hardly a window to complain about how bad things are.
The opposition accepts this new reality of horizontal coalitions more meekly. It resists admitting leadership in honor of unity, and breaks down in documents and seminars some methodology that would avoid the harshness of coexistence, if it becomes a government again.
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