If you look at the matter closely, The Government achieved a great victory this Wednesday. With a very small block and allies who had started the path hesitantlymanaged to gather the third of deputies necessary to sustain the veto by Javier Milei to the University Financing Law.
To reinforce this view, it could be added that this victory allowed the President to raise his banner as champion of fiscal balance higher, something that always celebrated by those who participate in the purchase and sale of shares and securities in the markets financial.
Moving away a little from what happened that day, you can see that something very similar happened less than a month ago, because this is the second veto that Milei manages to sustain, after the vote in Deputies on the formula for increases for retirees and pensioners. .
On that scale, the Government can still continue celebrating, because it managed to string one triumph of the Executive Branch over Congress after another. However, the first alarm also appears there. ¿This behavior will become a pattern? Does Milei plan to continue governing with vetoes of laws voted by the Legislative Branch? Also: if he is an employer, does the President plan to veto all the laws proposed by the opposition or only those that imply greater public spending or a rearrangement of budget items?
From what has been seen so far, Milei used the two possibilities offered by the Constitution to model the laws: decrees and vetoes.
One explanation for that decision is that he did it because he had no other choice. According to this idea, a Government in a parliamentary minority as aggravated as that suffered by La Libertad Avanza cannot successfully advance its own laws.
But it can also be said that the Government did manage to get Congress to approve the Base Law, one of the most comprehensive reforms – due to the diversity of topics, scope and complexity – in recent history. That law was so big that the Executive Branch has spent months dripping in regulations of articles to put its parts into operation.
Moving a little further away from the focus of attention, more problems appear.
One is political. The Government got allies to support it in two very unfriendly vetoes, which went against the interests of retirees first and of public universities later. The second, even, as the Macrista allies of the Government admit, was irrelevant if considered in budgetary terms. Therefore, the question is until when Milei will achieve drag in allies who vote against their own interests electoral. Unless Macrismo believes that its only political solution is an alliance with the ruling party, next year the elections will be responsible for breaking up those agreements.
The other problem is institutional. Governing through vetoes and decrees is turning into common tools that the Constitution itself considers completely exceptional. To put it another way, the Argentine legal system It is designed to prevent a President from arrogating to himself those kinds of benefitsand validating that a Government acts like this is allowing similar actions in the future.
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