On Thursday, in the middle of the meetings between Government representatives, led by Guillermo Francosand the heads of the dialogue blocs, the legislators of the Civic Coalition presented a bill to “modify the primary election system” that eliminates the mandatory nature of the PASO.
“All political groups will be able to select their candidates for national elective public positions and Mercosur parliamentarians through primary elections, simultaneously, throughout the national territory, in a single elective act and with a secret vote. Those political groups that present a single list are excluded from participating in these elections.“, the deputies proposed Juan Manuel Lopez -head of the block-, Maximiliano Ferraro and Paula Oliveto, among others.
Beyond the parliamentary viability of the project – the various legislative groups recognize that there are no homogeneous positions on this issue behind closed doors – its presentation these days was not coincidental. Official sources assured this medium that the Government will try to move forward with a kind of “electoral package” that, in part, was included in the first “omnibus law” that Javier Milei sent to Congress at the end of December, and which had to be withdrawn due to lack of agreements, and which, if successful, will directly impact next year’s elections.
The Casa Rosada will try to move forward, according to what they said, once the ruling party manages to settle the parliamentary discussion around the Bases Law and the fiscal package that the President hopes to have definitively sanctioned in the coming weeks in Deputies, after the general approval in the Senate.
“It is not an issue to hold individual positions”highlighted on Friday an allied deputy who participated in the previous day’s meeting with Francos and who, as he confided, was approached by the Executive to start “talking” about the issue.
Last week, for example, a meeting had been called between officials and legislators to begin outlining a legislative strategy, but it was suspended to prioritize negotiations around the Base Law and the fiscal package. According to reports, representatives of the Government and legislators of the allied opposition could meet in the coming weeks.
Last month, Infobae had already published that the Government would try to give priority after this semester’s debate on the Base Law to the incorporation of the Single Paper Ballot, which already has half a sanction in the Lower House. “It is a priority,” they said then.
In these hours, in Casa Rosada they highlighted that, indeed, in a sector of the government they insist on the idea of trying to reach a consensus with the allies in Parliament on the implementation of the single ballot that had half a sanction in the lower house in June 2022 and which in January of this year obtained a committee opinion in the Senate with the signature of a dozen senators from La Libertad Avanza, PRO, radicalism and Peronism. Among them, Pablo Blanco and Maximiliano Abad (UCR); Guadalupe Tagliaferri (PRO); Edgardo Kueider (PJ)and Natalia Gadano, from the Alliance for Santa Cruz. The latter are two of the senators who were key for the Base Law and the fiscal package to have favorable sanction in the Upper House, and for Milei to finally have the delegation of powers from it.
The project, promoted in 2022 by the deputy Silvia Lospennato, of the PRO, imitated the Córdoba model for the validation of votes and the Santa Fe model for the case of blank votes, which guaranteed, due to the mix of both systems, the support of legislators from those two districts. In the Senate, the panorama is much more heterogeneous due to the proliferation of provincial parties.
Official sources explained that, among the initiatives in the pipeline, the Executive will try to hold the discussion to eliminate caps on financing of political campaigns, a sensitive topic for the interests of the parties, crossed for decades by a high level of opacity. “Beyond the ideological, the Government has a problem with the campaigns, it is to launder, so that next year the great fortunes or capital from abroad will contribute to them,” said an opposition legislator who follows these issues. The Executive would like to establish the North American collection system. Unlimited.
The Government also said that they will try to eliminate free broadcast spaces that are assigned to the political spaces in the campaign, and that tend to benefit the smaller parties that do not have the structure and financing of the largest ones. Meanwhile, mention is made of the project “clean record” as another of those considered in the “electoral package.”
In relation to the PASO, the Government has the idea of modifying the system of primary elections and making them mandatory, but they recognize the difficulties to move forward in that sense, due to the internal difficulties of each party. In particular, in the PRO and the UCR, two of the allies.
At the time, Mauricio Macri He had thought about the possibility of eliminating the primaries, but he was rejected by radicalism’s partners. So, it was devised to remove the mandatory nature of that system, an allusive project was even presented in 2016. Three years later, the former president had a very tough defeat in the August primaries, in 2019.
Among the arguments, one similar to the one used now was appealed at that time: costs. It also serves in the case of printing ballots, for example, for the promotion of the single ballot. In last year’s elections, the State’s contribution accounted for 15% of the total budget. In 2021, it had been 11%.
It is one of the premises of the foundations written in the project presented last Thursday by the Civic Coalition in Deputies. “If this project (the Single Paper Ballot) were voted with the half sanction that this Chamber gave to the single ballot project, the Argentine State, and especially its taxpayers, would save a considerable amount of money. For example, during the 2023 elections, the National Electoral Directorate spent more than $13,000 million to pay for ballots, to which is added the amount that political groups spend informally,” they argued.
In this context, the upcoming legislative discussion in relation to the electoral area takes place in the midst of the party negotiations that LLA and the PRO have been carrying out for months, the resolution of which is, for now, uncertain. The influential Secretary General of the Presidency, Karina Milei, is dedicated to obtaining legal status for the seal throughout the country, to become independent from Macri and its allies. In this sense, there is growing concern about how the electoral board of the city of Buenos Aires, the cradle of the PRO, which renews the Senate, will be resolved in 2025. The Macri family cannot afford to give ground to the libertarian project.
As for the “electoral package”, it is, for example, a series of initiatives for which the Government is not remotely guaranteed any type of success. The thing is that, first, the Casa Rosada must finish securing the votes in Deputies to be able to reverse the Senate’s rejection of part of the fiscal package, especially Profits and Personal Assets. They are two fundamental chapters for the Government. It was the main message that Francos, María Ibarzabal and José Rolandi -much more comfortable with this decision-making system implemented by the former Minister of the Interior than with the style he had established Nicolas Posse– They left it to the dialogue block leaders: to gather the votes for those two titles. Only after that, and six months of back and forth, will the Government be able to start thinking about the rest of the initiatives.
