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Martín Lousteau and Gerardo Morales, visible faces of the division of radicalism.
The reunification of the two blocks of the UCR, which at some point had been planned for this month, is further away than ever. The governor of Jujuy, Gerardo Morales, questioned a deputy from the Martín Lousteau bloc for presenting a project in tune with the idea of dollarizing the economy that Javier Milei raised. This produced a cross between Morales and Martín Tetaz, among other co-religionists who happily joined the public dispute, with terms such as “stupidity”, “delirium”, “I apologized”, “I resigned” and others of the like. The truth is that no one expects the blocs to recover unity and the division sedimented party radicalism for a long time.
It all started when the deputy Alexander Cacace He presented a project to dollarize the economy, according to a proposal that the ultraliberal Milei had been discussing in the media with other leaders of Together for Change, such as former Economy Minister Alfonso Pray-Gay (who spoke out once morest it). The text proposes a sharp devaluation, followed by an official dollarization (give up having a national currency and, like Ecuador, adopt the dollar), which –according to legislator Cacace– would serve to “solve the problem of high inflation that has affected our country for decades.” The peso would cease to be valid in 180 days and only greenbacks would remain.
clown
Gerardo Morales, who seeks to be the UCR candidate for the Presidency in 2023, came out to answer Cacace in terms that surprised his co-religionists: he directly treated him as a clown. “I absolutely reject the clownish project presented by a deputy from Evolution. You have to be irresponsible and naive, to say the least, to argue that dollarization is the way out. Dollarization is worse than Convertibility,” remarked the governor of Jujuy and current president of the UCR, in line with what Pray-Gay had been saying (whom the radicals take as their own reference). No one escaped the fact that Cacace He mentioned him as “a deputy from Evolution”, the Lousteau sector that broke with the radicalism bloc led by Mario Negri.
During that rupture, Morales was also furious, glasses flew, he accused the head of the Buenos Aires government, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, of buying deputies to leave the ruling party. Then, the waters calmed down, Morales and Lousteau agreed on a joint leadership of the UCR and it was supposed that during the summer negotiations would take place so that the two blocs of radicalism would become one once more. The truth is the negotiations never came, there are still two separate blocks and rubble flies from one to the other.
Morales continued once morest Cacace: “This has already caused us irreparable damage in the past, destroying the country’s productive apparatus. Believing that with 7 articles of a bill the problems of the economy and inflation in the country will be solved it is a great stupidityhe blurted out. “Besides, it’s a delusion to think that the Central Bank is going to have dollars to exchange people’s pesos. We already know these orthodox and neoliberal proposals, they are old, backward and failed in the country,” concluded the governor of Jujuy.
In the bench that Negri leads, they commented that no one expects there to be unity between the blocks anymore. They intuit that Emiliano Yacobitti found it more useful to maintain his own bloc, with Rodrigo De Loredo as head of the bloc, and that he will never promote negotiations to reunite. With these conclusions in mind, Morales mercilessly attacks Lousteau’s deputies.
Kickback
And on the other side there was a counterattack, which was led by deputy Martín Tetaz. He pointed directly to the head of the UCR: “I hope Gerardo Morales apologizes for the outburst. He is talking regarding a Deputy of the Nation, who has presented a project with which he may or may not agree, but which offers a proposal to solve the main problem of Argentina. Do you have a better one? Introduce her.”
Other voices joined the dispute, such as that of the member of the Radical Convention Miguel Ponce, who told Tetaz: “The one who should apologize, or resign from the bench, for betraying his voters and radicalism, is the ‘deputy’ of Milei’s Evolution with ideas”.
Morales, of course, was also answered by the author of the project. “Dear president of my party: inflation is a serious problem in our economy, which has not been solved for a long time. I think we should encourage ourselves to think regarding policies that solve it, with data and evidence, without prejudice or aggression. Let’s have that debate at the UCR,” Cacace replied.
The deputy, in turn, was answered by a senator from Jujuy, Silvia Giacoppo, who warned that, if he is really interested in debating within the UCR, he should have done so before presenting the project: “It is rare to ask for debate in the party when the project presented was not previously debated. The data and evidence of that backward recipe are suffered (and suffered) by millions of Argentines. It is not prejudice. Is history”.
In Lousteau’s entourage, they preferred to interpret Morales as a more specific criticism of Cacace and stressed that the governor of Jujuy agreed with some of Lousteau’s ideas once morest the project presented by the ruling party in the Senate to recover leaked funds and allocate them to the payment of the debt with the IMF. In any case, no one dares to talk regarding a reunification period between the radical blocs.