If last year was an election year, 2026 comes across as a World Cup year with football overtones or undertones to the week’s main news items here (whither the Group G Iranian team due to play in Los Angeles in June, one might also ask, but this editorial will concentrate on Argentina). President Javier Milei’s state-of-the-nation speech last Sunday night stretched beyond 100 minutes, not only because of his slanging-match with Kirchnerite deputies but also constant interruption from the barra brava chants of applauding libertarian deputies and spectators more resembling a football crowd than witnesses of an institutional event. Border Guard corporal Nahuel Gallo’s release from 15 months of Venezuelan captivity was brokered by the AFA Argentine Football Association with a Bolivarian régime begrudging Milei any bragging rights. The incoming new Justice Minister Juan Bautista Mahiques was last in the news for celebrating his birthday in the mansion of AFA treasurer Pablo Toviggino, while only a few months ago he was appointed vice-chancellor of UNAFA university. The news item most directly linked to sports was, of course, Thursday’s football strike called to protest the court summons that day of AFA president Claudio ‘Chiqui’ Tapia on tax evasion charges (now postponed).
Mahiques becoming minister to replace Mariano Cúneo Libarona, who had been calling it quits for months, occupied the headlines but the real news was at the level immediately below. In many ways the real justice czar had been deputy minister Sebastián Amerio, who directly responded to star spin doctor Santiago Caputo – now displaced (without the slightest intention of leaving, unlike Cúneo Libarona) by Santiago Viola, a lawyer extremely close to Presidential Chief-of-Staff Karina Milei. In both cases the tail can be expected to wag the dog.
This renewed bout of infighting between Karina Milei and Santiago Caputo gives most pundits more than enough food for analysis but there are other aspects. The AFA links of Mahiques are already paradoxical, given the government’s all-out confrontation with Tapia. Viola also has skeletons in his closet as previously the defence lawyer of Kirchnerite tycoon Lázaro Báez (when his partner was Franco Bindi, the husband of maverick libertarian deputy Marcela Pagano, a couple apparently playing a key role in the negotiations preceding Gallo’s release). The new deputy minister’s efforts on behalf of Báez included falsely accusing federal judge Sebastián Casanello via bogus witnesses of meeting then president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the tycoon in the Casa Rosada in order to have the judge removed from the case in the hope of a more benevolent magistrate.
The new minister will have plenty on his plate with two Supreme Court benches to fill and over 200 more at lower instances while Eduardo Casal is now in his ninth year as “temporary” prosecutor-general. If as many as 47 of the 72 senators have voted in the past to give the government quorum for its legislation, this falls only one short of the two-thirds majority required to nominate new Supreme Court justices with no need to negotiate with Kirchnerite caucuses. Ex-governor Gerardo Zamora controls all three Senate seats of Santiago del Estero, also the native province of his business partner Toviggino, so that football might also have its part to play there with the AFA treasurer bartering the Santiago del Estero Senate votes in exchange for impunity from the charges arising from his opulent lifestyle. All casting a shadow over the moral imperative which Milei claimed to be underlying his state-of-the-nation speech.
Although theoretically prime time, delivering a state-of-the-nation speech on a weekend night left it vulnerable to being ignored and overtaken by events (not least with the menace of world war arising from the “elimination” of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei the previous day) while the slanging-match dominated media coverage. The original text was not bereft of substance alongside the purple prose but short on detail (nothing more specific than 10 packages of structural reform per ministry for the legislative agenda ahead). Milei’s insults only served to lend importance to the fading force of Kirchnerism, perhaps a deliberate strategy to preserve an electoral opponent virtually guaranteeing him victory. While the President was criticised beyond the opposition for his infra dig degradation of a solemn institutional occasion, perhaps more attention should be given to some spurious claims in the original text which do not resist fact-checking (no rise in unemployment, zero pickets last year, the inherited mass illiteracy of schoolchildren and even two consecutive years of growth with a minus 1.8 percent contraction in 2024 the official INDEC statistics bureau figure).
But meanwhile the World Cup draws ever closer – and, once again, Milei is jetting off to the main host nation of this year’s tournament, putting his domestic problems on pause in search of international success.
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