From PRO to Cambiemos… to Juntos por el Cambio or Juntos?

Miguel Ángel Pichetto this week maintained that Mauricio Macri’s error after winning the 2017 midterms was to want to imitate what Javier Milei is doing now, using even the same phrase “cultural battle.” A triumph needs to be open, to the Peronists of Córdoba and the socialists of Santa Fe while seeking agreements with non-Kirchnerite Peronism, in order to build up political support. This transmits to the markets the idea that the reforms being introduced, although gradually, would stay around forever since enjoying multi-party consensus, explained Pichetto.

Speaking to Radio Perfil, Mario Riorda – who directs the masters degree in political communication at the Austral University – said much the same thing: it is the victorious leader who should open up because the cost to be paid is much lower. The only leader in Argentina to do so in recent years was Néstor Kirchner in 2007 with his “transversal” politics, while his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Macri and Milei did the opposite and suffered (or will suffer) the consequences.

This common perspective, from this country’s most experienced active politician and the Argentine political consultant who has coached the most elections, turns on its head Macri’s diagnosis of where he went wrong. Those errors resulted in the failed two-headed presidency of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the current emergence of Javier Milei.

Milei’s guru Santiago Caputo (tossed out of Jaime Durán Barba’s consultancy firm by Macri in 2018 after criticising them for being too lukewarm) and Macri share the thesis of attributing the failure of the Cambiemos government to gradualism. In Macri’s words: “We should have done the same things faster.” That diagnosis led Macri to swing right, abandoning Durán Barba’s advice, parting company with Marcos Peña and preferring Patricia Bullrich to Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and then, whether subconsciously or not, Javier Milei to Patricia Bullrich.

Milei’s first year in office has indicated the need for the ex-members of Juntos por el Cambio (PRO, the Radicals and the Coalición Cívica) to recover their identity. They might agree with some of Milei’s economic logic but they disagree with his authoritarian methods, which are even worse than Kirchnerism. Instead of swinging to the right, that recovery of identity requires the exact opposite, moving to the centre, which is what permitted them to win in 2015 and 2017, lose very honourably in 2019 and win again in 2021, with the model of Rodríguez Larreta, not Bullrich.

The last 13 months have sufficed to prove that Milei’s worst adversary is true liberalism, economic, polítical and cultural, opposing the libertarian warcry of “God, fatherland, family and property” with “reason, science, progress and human values.”

As Artemio López explained in his recent Perfil column (recommended reading); “The great popular rebellions do not come, at least not initially, from the most vulnerable social sectors. In the ‘Cordobazo’ in the late 1960s it was the best-paid workers of heavy industry along with the university students who lit the spark against the dictatorship of [Juan Carlos] Onganía. Even in the crisis of 2001, when emerging from almost a quarter-century of neoliberalism, it was the middle classes with their savings trapped in the banks who began the rebellion.”

After a decade of sustained impoverishment, the lower classes have begun to lose their aspirations to equality, satisfying themselves with mere subsistence. Artemio López cites the paradox of French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville: “When social inequality is overwhelmingly great, it is seen as natural, the social imagination is incapable of envisaging even the possibility of its extinction with nobody thinking of trying to transform the established order.”

Confronting libertarian authoritarianism will have to be entrusted to the middle, not lower class, disciplined by a decade of poverty robbing them of desire and a year of Patricia Bullrich activating fear. The best example was the march in favour of public universities with old-style Radicalism as its dynamo, which was much bigger and more significant than all those organised by Kirchnerism, the trade unions and the left.

The middle class was politically represented by Cambiemos in 2015, when Marcos Peña intelligently considered the coalition to be an evolution towards the centre from a right-wing party like PRO. The challenge would be to return to the roots of that version of Cambiemos, distancing itself from La Libertad Avanza (LLA) to represent middle-class values while sharing the need for  fiscal surplus (Roberto Lavagna was the father of the twin surpluses) but rejecting authoritarianism in any form (Milei, who was elected to order the economy, speaking against “woke” discourse at Davos is the mirror image of Alberto Fernández speaking of ending patriarchal society while poverty rose).

Perhaps bringing forward the City elections is a sign of PRO awareness that they need to recover the identity or perish absorbed by the LLA. PRO’s best road to the future is not that traced by Bullrich while she chaired the party but by Rodríguez Larreta. Paradoxically, “el Macri negro,” as they call Buenos Aires City Mayor Jorge Macri to differentiate him from his patrician cousin, might achieve what Rodríguez Larreta could not. Contracting as a campaign consultant Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí – who made Gustavo Petro president of Colombia and took Sergio Massa within three points of the presidency with his first-round victory when representing the government with the worst approval ratings in democracy – attests to a lack of ideological blinkers.

Just as Peronism erroneously backed Milei to weaken Juntos por el Cambio, it might today have the intelligence to understand the importance for the democratic system of having a reloaded neo-Cambiemos, so as not to leave part of the middle class lacking representation and as a tool of political balance in the face of any drift into authoritarianism.