Making good politics depends to a large extent on the ability of leaders, parties and governments to resolve a fundamental contradiction posed by this complex art: alliance-building strategies that are most effective in winning elections are usually not good for governing and vice versa.
Proof of this are the last two national governments that emerged from very broad alliances that allowed them to add votes from different sources, but when it came to carrying out a management, they ended up immobilized by their own internal ones.
The short ballot for the renewal provides an example of exactly the opposite, that of a strategy designed to govern rather than to add votes. It arises from an idea that was from the genesis of the political space founded by Carlos Rovira: that of decoupling Misiones from the agenda that they impose in Buenos Aires, with the conviction that this was the only way to put the issues that interest them on the table. to the province and never appear on that national agenda.
Putting that idea into practice required many years and discipline, because any claim to impose its own agenda was no more than an irrelevant utopia for the highly indebted province and dependent on national handouts that Puertismo built, when Misiones depended on the ATN even to pay salaries.
First, it was necessary to reduce the province’s debt and implement a fiscal policy that would give it a certain margin of autonomy. With a firm long-term vision sustained since his leadership, the renewal was achieved in a relatively short time and despite the successive crises of the national economy. In 2015, Misiones had for the first time, at least since the recovery of democracy, a provincial government – that of Hugo Passalacqua – that was in a position to look down on the conflicts of national politics and distance itself from the national armed groups. .
The debut of the short ticket in 2019 was the next step and the direct consequence of that provincial vision. A daring political decision because it implied participating in elections in which the president was elected without hanging on any candidate who competed in that category.
This strategy most likely cost the renewal votes and perhaps even some seats in Congress – uchronía is an imprecise genre by nature – but it gave the provincial government and its national legislators much more political weight in the national concert and the degree of independence necessary to stick to his own agenda.
Misiones does not follow orders issued from Buenos Aires or from Santa Cruz, its deputies and senators are not supporters of any national armed force and that put it on the verge of obtaining answers to many of its historical claims, such as the special customs zone or the reactivation of their ports and to demand solutions to more conjunctural issues such as the affectation suffered by exporters of the forest industry, tobacco and tea due to exchange delays.
Albert’s visit
The President had to clash once morest this firm provincialist position in his recent visit to Misiones. He arrived with ambitions of adding the provincial government to his crusade to bring the Supreme Court to impeachment, but he only achieved a correct protocol reception from Governor Oscar Herrera Ahuad and part of his Cabinet and had to listen once more to the proposals that the renewal has been promoting. in favor of the province.
The absence of the president of the Legislature Carlos Rovira did not go unnoticed, who did not go to receive him at the airport or participate in the act of handing over 600 homes in the Itaembé Guazú neighborhood of Posada, which was the official reason for the presidential visit.
They left Alberto so alone that the leaders of the Frente de Todos in Misiones, neither the Kirchnerist leg nor the PAyS, did not even go to see him, which leaves new evidence of the fracture of that space, also in the province.
The president who during his campaign promised to seat the governors at the decision-making table never practiced federalism when it came to governing and now the governors are charging him for it.
He never did anything to correct the centralist criteria with which subsidies to public transport and energy are distributed, he consented to the price policy of the state company YPF that discriminates once morest the most remote provinces, he took away the money that Macri had given to the CABA only to hand it over to the governor of Buenos Aires, never had a policy to support regional economies and vetoed the special customs area that was included in the 2021 budget.
With this background, it is not uncommon for Alberto to now find it difficult to gain the support of the provinces for his impeachment request to the Supreme Court of Justice, presented just a few days ago.
Both Alberto and Cristina know that the impeachment trial has zero chances of advancing in a divided Congress, but they seek the support of the provinces to leave the opposition alone and, incidentally, take out defenders of federalism.
Misiones, together with three other provinces, raised its own position in the conflict of interest around the co-participation of the City of Buenos Aires. They questioned that the richest city in the country, which is also the jurisdiction where most of the national spending is carried out, receives more funds by order of justice, but they also questioned that the Alberto government has allocated exclusively to the province of Buenos Aires the totality of the funds that he opportunely cut from the CABA.
Always above the crack and maintaining consistency with its historic claim for more federalism, Misiones did not get involved in the dispute between the national government and the Court, instead it returned to demand a more equitable distribution of the funds that the Nation collects throughout the country.
But Alberto’s visit was far from being the most anticipated in Misiones. The greatest expectation is placed on the arrival of the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa. Sources from the provincial government assure that the start-up of the special customs area that will govern the entire provincial territory and will be executed in stages has already been completed. First of all, there will be specific benefits for the forestry industry and better conditions for exporting.
According to the same provincial sources, efforts are also advanced to put into effect a special exchange rate for the missionary export offer, a request that Governor Oscar Herrera Ahuad himself was in charge of insistently managing with national authorities.
The removal of withholdings on missionary exports, another of the proposals of the provincial government, generates more reluctance in national orbits.
The idea of the team led by Massa is to progressively correct the exchange rate delay with micro-devaluations that exceed inflation and grant differential exchange rates -such as the soybean dollar- so that those sectors that saw their profitability most affected can build a bridge until the progressive correction of the exchange rate arrears put things back in place.
Of course, all this depends directly on keeping inflation below 4% per month and with a downward trend, otherwise it would be very risky to devalue above inflation.
Without resting in the summer, the missionary governor was very active, carrying out numerous efforts and requests to resolve other specific issues that interest various sectors of the economy that generate employment and wealth.
On the one hand, he asked the Nation to build wooden houses throughout the country, as a way to use the raw material that was no longer exported due to the various macroeconomic situations of the countries that used to buy.
New airs in Brazil
On a strictly economic level, the assumption of Lula Da Silva in Brazil brought news that generated expectation among missionary industrialists.
As reported by the Argentine ambassador in the neighboring country, Daniel Scioli, one of the first measures to be adopted to boost trade between the two countries will be the introduction of necessary changes in the regime that allows paying for imports with local currency.
This is a regime that was already in force but was not used in practice because it required daily updates of the amounts of the operations to adjust the exchange rate; now these updates can be made every 180 days.
This is a long-awaited change, especially by the Misiones forestry industry, dependent on inputs from Brazil, which finds it difficult to access the dollars it needs to carry out these imports.
Panorama local
In this context of consolidation of the provincial government management and renewal as a provincial project, there is a growing identification, especially among young students, entrepreneurs and professionals, with the graduate in Economic Sciences, Lucas Romero Spinelli. They see him as a young figure with content and a message aimed at youth and focused on his interests such as youth employment and knowledge economies.
While Misiones deals with resolving substantive issues that contribute to the well-being of the population and the growth of the economy, the great national fronts continue to be caught up in their rift, in their internships, and in an agenda that is increasingly distant from the interests of the people. . Sterile fights for power, for charges and for the box are leading national politics to have the lowest levels of consideration of the people in history.
It is that neither the previous government nor the current one have managed to solve the most urgent problem for the people, which is inflation. Much less health, education, employment or security. Systematically, each one of the last presidents, has been worsening the economic state, the social tension and the institutionality of Argentina.
In all this panorama, Misiones stands out for the order, balance and the indicators in constant improvement in education, public health, security and growth of the economy.
The national vacuum allowed the growth of the figure of Javier Milei, who stopped being an outsider to become a serious candidate for the presidency and threatened to break the hegemony of the two great fronts.
The latest polls place the ultraliberal as the potential winner in the ballotage in the event of facing the strongest candidate of Juntos, which today is Rodríguez Larreta, the beneficiary of the Court in the distribution of the co-participation. It is that the Peronist votes would not accompany the Buenos Aires and would lean mainly towards the libertarian.
The head of the Buenos Aires government has not stopped falling in the polls since the scandal broke out in the chats of his Minister of Security and Justice, Marcelo D’Alesandro, with officials of the Supreme Court of Justice in which they can be seen talking on judicial rulings that later materialized. The entire country witnessed the links of Larretismo with the Court, something that left the former Macrista in a very bad light in front of his fellow governors of other provinces.
But there is still a long way to go and many pieces to move on the board of national politics. Today the Frente de Todos does not have a serious candidate. In Kirchnerism they look more affectionately on the candidacy for governor of Buenos Aires than the presidential candidacy. The only serious applicant that might emerge from the current national government is Sergio Massa, from Tigre, although that depends on his ability to keep inflation at bay.
