The 100 days of Manuel Adorni finally ended in a Waterloo in the same month of June – the country is mercifully freed of a media obsession crowding out more important issues. Those who would defend Adorni by comparing the relatively petty sums spent on travel abroad and home renovation with the millions of dollars in Jésica Cirio’s wardrobe or his drab gated community house with the opulent mansions of AFA Argentine Football Association bosses would still have to explain why a man with such negligible credentials came to be Cabinet chief in the first place. But this needlessly prolonged saga is finally over and time to move on.
Interior Minister Diego Santilli (retaining that portfolio for now) has been installed as the new Cabinet chief – if that is the correct verb, given that President Javier Milei has already discarded three other men in little over 30 months and if he warrants being considered the chief minister since Presidential Chief-of-Staff Karina Milei is almost universally seen as the real Cabinet chief anyway. Thus far this year Santilli has been far more active in dialogue and negotiations with provincial governors, Congress and the moderate opposition than Adorni ever was so that he may already be considered an improvement on that front.
As a former card-carrying member of the PRO centre-right party, Santilli places the relations of the ruling La Libertad Avanza party with its chief ally on a new footing. At first sight hoisting the yellow colours to such a prominent place alongside the purple might seem to cement the coalition with PRO while easing tensions within the party but it might also be taken amiss as a challenge to the domination of the Macri cousins – ex-president Mauricio, the party founder, and Buenos Aires City Mayor Jorge. If Adorni had been lined up by Karina Milei for almost a year as next year’s City mayoral candidate until he fell into disgrace, why not Santilli? In recent weeks Jorge Macri has been posturing almost to the right of Attila the Hun in a bid to secure the national government’s blessing for his re-election and avoid the libertarian challenge mounted in the last two City elections.
If Adorni was anointed for the City mayoral candidacy in the aftermath of La Libertad Avanza’s resounding midterm triumph, Santilli then emerged as a strong contender for the 2027 Buenos Aires Province gubernatorial candidacy after leading the government’s Congress list to an upset win in that Peronist stronghold – a strong contender but Karina Milei remained enamoured with Sebastián Pareja, the marshal of defeat in the previous month’s provincial elections. The installation of Santilli as Cabinet chief now seems to remove any obstacles to a Pareja candidacy, which (as things now stand) might well fare even worse than last September given the crisis in a Greater Buenos Aires industrial belt on the wrong side of the libertarian model. Furthermore, Pareja could stand to be further undermined by a rival PRO candidacy if there were to be any sour grapes over a bid to remove the Macri surname from City Hall.
High on Santilli’s agenda would thus be ensuring unified government candidacies in these two key electoral districts but that task could be complicated by Milei’s renewed urgency to eliminate the PASO primaries, considered essential by third parties to unify their own candidacies. Given the decisive weight of these third parties in Congress voting even after the midterm triumph, this would be a hard sell, especially in the Senate where that debate would begin. Santilli would thus be expected to defend PRO’s self-interest in the continuation of PASO primaries, which could lead him into an early clash with Karina Milei intent on a divided opposition in order to improve the chances of a libertarian government ailing in the opinion polls.
At least the formidable distractions of the World Cup will give Santilli a few weeks to settle into office and ponder his various dilemmas. He will at least have the advantage of not being continually on the defensive like Adorni and perhaps might even be able to take the offensive, undermining Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof, the probable Peronist presidential candidate, with both his estrangement from ex-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the wardrobe millions originating from his former Cabinet chief Martín Insaurralde. Taking on an AFA leadership strongly linked to Peronism and Kicillof for their tax evasion and corruption could be more delicate should the World Cup triumph yearned by the entire nation transpire. But everything is a work in progress for now.
Comments