The near in blood, the nearer bloody

This headline is a quotation from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth based on events in Scotland which within a fortnight will only be 15 years away from being a millennium in the past and yet it explains as well as anything the current political scenario in Argentina. One trial after another is being confirmed against ex-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner who earlier this month became the leader of the main opposition in name as well as in fact when formally taking the chair of the Partido Justicialista (Peronist) and yet the main targets of libertarian trolls in their witch-hunt for “enemies of freedom” nowadays are two other women very much more on their side of the divide – Vice-President Victoria Villarruel and veteran centrist politician Elisa Carrió. PRO deputies in Congress have been faithful government allies on numerous occasions, salvaging presidential vetoes more than once, and yet some libertarian poaching has disrupted the City Hall of PRO Mayor Jorge Macri.

The transfer of Diego Kravetz from seconding City Security Minister Waldo Wolff to a similar position in SIDE intelligence was fatal for his sponsor, former two-term Lanús mayor, last year’s Buenos Aires Province Juntos por el Cambio gubernatorial candidate and this year’s City Cabinet chief Néstor Grindetti, but all this was just the tip of an iceberg. Libertarian City legislators have been doing the opposite of their PRO national counterparts, hampering or directly voting against Macri’s most important initiatives at every turn, ever since last year’s mayoral candidate Ramiro Marra was replaced as their caucus chief by Pilar Ramírez at the behest of presidential chief-of-staff Karina Milei, who makes little secret of an ultimate objective of destroying PRO in their main bastion.

Villarruel was off to a bad start when not assigned a place in the group photo following the presidential inauguration last December and denied the say over the Defence and Security Ministries promised her during the campaign as representing the pro-military, denialist and nationalist right, losing out to defeated Juntos por el Cambio presidential candidate Patricia Bullrich. Arguably the root cause of her problems was an extended Financial Times article on her early in the year which in the light of the acute recession, roaring inflation and frequent signs of mental imbalance on the part of President Javier Milei at that time implied that she could be worth watching as the next president very soon. Quickly banished to the Senate (a secondary role which nevertheless boosted her popularity due to her sober handling of a fragmented chamber), the veep’s relationship with the President was largely neutral in the first half of the year but more recently there has been a tendency to magnify even minor points – such as her visit to Isabel Perón in Madrid or her unwisely chauvinistic support for the racist and homophobic video against the French football team posted by Enzo Fernández – at Villarruel’s expense. And now more recently the flak for presiding over the session expelling the government ally Senator Edgardo Kueider when acting president (whether formally or not).

Carrió’s crime has been to be rather more consistent against the “caste” than a government whose crusade is to eradicate the “caste” from public life, but makes federal judge Ariel Lijo (whom some would call the dirtiest of a dirty dozen among the 12 Comodoro Py magistrates) its prime nominee for the Supreme Court. The Coalición Cívica founder was the only politician to question Andrés Vázquez when he was appointed head of DGI internal revenue exactly two months ago today within the overhaul of the AFIP tax bureau now rebranded as ARCA – his three decades as a taxman included abusing his position for the persecution of opposition leaders and journalists, she pointed out. With Vázquez now in the limelight over his undeclared Miami real estate, the government has turned up the heat on Carrió with Milei personally questioning the number of her bodyguards.

As the third president in the last 35 years with a five-letter surname beginning with “M,” Milei would seem much keener on following in the footsteps of the one (Carlos Menem) than the other (Mauricio Macri) but he should worry about his road along that path being too complete – the deregulation and the stabilisation of the currency (along with dollar prices higher than ever) is starting to become accompanied by the shadows of corruption which always stalked Menem. Time to stop being the snake biting its own tail and return to being the libertarian lion against the caste instead of co-opting it.