Javier Milei in the footsteps of Kirchner and Macri

The government is seeking to recover from the grief over the passage of the ATN distribution law by taking the matter to court. It had promised this to the IMF, which includes this scenario in the latest economic program review document.

During Thursday's House session, at the time of voting, Martín Menem unleashed the ruse to open that possibility. He claimed that the bill coming from the Senate required a special majority of 129 votes because it was a tax law.

The opposition challenged this approach, despite which the bill easily passed more than half of the House members. The ruse was almost naive: if it had been a tax bill, it should have been introduced through the House of Representatives, according to the Constitution. Nor did the Senate specify, in its message to the House, the declaration that it was a special law.

What Congress approved does not affect the revenue sharing law. It is a reform of an article in the complementary budget law (Law 11,672). Government lawyers plan to delay in court the implementation of the distribution of ATN funds (1% of revenue sharing) according to the distribution of the Revenue Sharing Law (Law 23,548).

The push doesn't end there: it's followed by an attempt to demand that the courts ensure that the distribution of the ATN funds currently administered by the nation be carried out after the provincial legislatures approve their adherence to the new regime.

The presidential veto is already included in the obstacle course of the project demanded by the governors' panel in the document "A Federal Cry." This is encouraged by the fact that approval in the House of Representatives fell short of two-thirds of the votes.

A glimmer of hope for a possible veto. If the government's rejection escalates further in the House of Representatives, it could end up in the Supreme Court. The high court is a "Bermuda Triangle" where a federal case like this can linger for many years.

Wouldn't it have been easier for the government to build a majority closer to its interests? Building majorities ensures that an administration's measures are sustainable over time. Passing laws by a single vote creates illusions of victory, but it doesn't guarantee solutions. Forging agreements is what builds the future and is the recipe for survival for weak governments.

The government understands, like others before it, that the future is built by controlling narratives and messages. Playing the minority game is based on the presumption that governing is about running publicity campaigns. Neither pro-government propaganda nor negative campaigns build power.

The ruling party's fascination with anchoring itself to a minority that challenges the majority expresses a belief that Congress's representation is false, without taking into account that this power is the result of the very results of the elections that brought Milei to the presidency.

Denying legitimacy to the legislative branch repeats an old pattern. It was inaugurated by Néstor Kirchner in 2003. He won the presidency after losing the election to Carlos Menem. The smallness of his electoral base led him to seek legitimacy by denying it to others.

For Kirchner, all civil society organizations lacked legitimacy. Because their legitimacy was low, he denied legitimacy to the other branches of government, political parties, the Church, the Armed Forces, business associations, and all public policy-making bodies.

Milei repeats the same thing when she discredits all these sectors with a wide range of insults. She has even repeated Macri's confession of impotence when he said that Congress is hijacked by "Kirchnerism" (which is what they call Peronism, as if there were any difference beyond the internalist views of the PJ).

It's a peculiar way of describing a reality that, if you don't like it, you have to engage in politics to change it before complaining: Peronism is the largest minority in both chambers, that its strength is the second-largest minority, and that it can only operate with the orthopedics of sectors of the PRO (Progressive Party of Catalonia), the UCR (United Left), the neutrality of blocs like Encuentro Federal (Federal Encounter), and, as occurred with the pension ban, by resorting to bargaining with the governors. Without them, it would not have been able to impose the pension ban.

In its review report, the IMF called on the government to seek support in Congress and society to ensure its management is sustainable: "Deeper collaboration with Congress will be necessary to advance key structural reforms, particularly in the areas of taxation, pensions, and the labor market.

Overall, building and sustaining broad social and political support for the Fund-supported reform agenda remains critical (…). In parallel, efforts must continue to ensure adequate social assistance and a fair distribution of adjustment costs (with greater emphasis on policies to facilitate job creation) in order to maintain social cohesion and political support throughout the program.”

Legislators such as Miguel Pichetto and Nicolás Massot made the same call in their speeches in the Chamber of Deputies. The president of Encuentro pointed out the limitation of the ruling party's primary objective being to consider itself a minority blocking opposition initiatives : "I think the consolidation of the necessary percentage to block the opposition is the government's main goal, when in reality, the government should have worked much more intelligently to forge agreements, to build a path of reasonableness, and to broaden the basis of institutional sustainability here in Parliament."

More acidly, Massot, a colleague from the same party, compared this fascination with minorities and the effects it would have on other countries. “Parliamentary systems,” he noted, “have a motto that we can adopt, without changing any of our practices and without ceasing to be a presidential system, which is that 'forming a government' is what Congress calls when it achieves a majority. Therefore, if there's no majority, there's no government; it puts them on an equal footing. That's a practice that not only this government should have learned.”

The test of the ability to reach agreements is the budget, something the ruling party has refused to discuss since taking office. In European parliamentary systems, if a government fails to pass the budget, it usually falls and calls for early elections.

Pedro Sánchez governs Spain without a majority to approve the budget, and he has extended the previous year's budget, despite criticizing him when he was in opposition to the conservative Mariano Rajoy, saying, "A government without a budget is as useful as a car without gasoline."

This expression is interesting because Sánchez's government today represents a corollary of minority domination, which is governing with an alliance of losers. In Argentina, Milei also governs with an alliance of losers: he was assisted in his first two years of government by the support of what was Juntos por el Cambio, which lost in 2023, and was spared, with discreet agreements, by the Peronism that allowed him to be a candidate and which also lost in 2023 under the banner of Unión por la Patria.

From another perspective, economist and former minister Jesús Rodríguez argued this week that the lack of political agreement often criticized in Argentina has its roots in the very beginning of the transition to democracy in 1983.

In the presentation of his essay "The Democratic Imprint: Politics and Economy in the Period 1983-1989," written in collaboration with Alejandro Garvie and awarded by the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Rodríguez described this transition as a process "through rupture." In this sense, Rodríguez stated: "There was no negotiation between the incoming political system and the outgoing dictatorship, unlike other transitions in Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, and Chile. This rupture, while it explained the holding of trials for state terrorism and illegal repression, was also the cause of the frustrations regarding economic and social outcomes."

Despite this "foundational rupture," the essayist pointed out some exceptions and agreements that marked the period. The rejection by all political parties of the military uprisings of Holy Week in 1987 was one of them. Other agreements were reached in Congress in 1989 between the outgoing Radical Party and the incoming Peronist Party.

At that time, three key laws were passed: the Defense Law, the Tax Sharing Law, and the review of industrial promotion regimes. In the following decades—not covered in Rodríguez and Garvie's essay—other significant agreements were reached, such as the Olivos Pact, the solution to the 2001 crisis with Eduardo Duhalde's parliamentary government, the agreements reached by the Macri administration in Congress to end its default in 2016, and the Fiscal Consensuses.

More recently, the Peronist opposition enabled Alberto Fernández's government to approve the Guzmán emergency laws, the debt sustainability law, and the agreement with the IMF.

Taking refuge in defeat proves the government's willingness to further build a minority government in the two years remaining for Javier Milei.

Instead of moving along the conventional path of the democratic system of 1) building power from the base to the top and 2) applying political energy to building majorities, it relies on confrontation from a reinforced smallness. It is a process that has its theorists on the right and the left.

On the left, Ernesto Laclau, a disciple of "Colorado," Jorge Abelardo Ramos, developed a theory of populism that identifies an "anti-people oligarchy" as the enemy, and a people-subject also constructed from power. The right-wing techno-populism that inspires administrations like those of the United States and some European countries builds on the remains of the founding thought of constitutionalism, a model that envisioned a trench of institutions against majorities, to prevent republics from falling into the hands of the "uncontrolled masses."

Qualified voting, indirect elections, lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court, and even the checks and balances of the democratic system that balance powers can be interpreted as institutions that serve as checks on the majorities. Natalio Botana's classic, "The Conservative Order" (1977), provides an insight into the creation of institutions that counteract the majorities in order to articulate civilization after despotism.

Theorists of minority tyranny today see in the United States a model against the majorities: "In no other democracy do minorities frustrate the wishes of majorities so routinely and permanently" (Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, "The Dictatorship of the Minority," 2024).

It is important to single out the United States because it is the self-confessed model of the current conservative government, which departs from the mandate of liberal democracy, a form of democracy that emerged in the West between the late 18th and 20th centuries, which seeks the confluence of collective self-government (that of the majority) and civil liberties (the rights of minorities).