The Argentine Congress approved the reversal of the cuts that the Javier Milei government is applying to public universities. With 57 votes in favor and 11 against, the Senate ratified the University Financing Law that had been approved by the Chamber of Deputies. The law orders the Executive to recompose the budget of the higher education system and the salaries of its professors, cut by Milei, as well as to continue updating them this year according to the evolution of inflation. At the same time, it is a clear message from the Legislative Power to the President, who is reminded of his scant parliamentary support and the need to build agreements. The Government had already announced that, if approved, it would veto the law. It would be Milei’s second veto, after canceling the increase in pensions promoted by Congress. In both cases, with the same argument: that they are norms that threaten fiscal balance.
The debate in the Upper House was followed from the outskirts of Congress by unions of teachers and students who mobilized, together with academic authorities, to support the bill. With their protests, the university community had already managed to stop Milei’s chainsaw in April and now, with parliamentary support, they took a step towards recovering the lost funds.
The 57 national universities, where some two million students study, are among the sectors of the State most affected by Milei’s adjustment. The university system’s budget suffered a real fall of 31.5% compared to last year, warned researchers from the Interdisciplinary Institute of Political Economy of the University of Buenos Aires. The purchasing power of the salaries of professors and university workers fell by a similar percentage, 33.3%, according to a report by the Universities of San Martín and Río Negro. “More than 85% of university professors are below the poverty line,” says the report.
The law approved this Thursday by the Senate declares a budgetary emergency for the university system during this year. It tells the Executive that it must update the appropriations for the operation of universities according to the accumulated inflation – between November and July of this year it reached 134.5% – and then implement a bi-monthly increase in accordance with the evolution of the Consumer Price Index. It establishes the same criteria for adjusting the salaries of professors and non-teaching workers, with a monthly update.
The debate
The law was created by a bill submitted by legislators from the Radical Civic Union (UCR), one of the opposition forces that has shown itself to be open to dialogue with the government, but which has a strong tradition of supporting public universities. In arguing for his vote in favor, Senator Martín Lousteau, president of the UCR, questioned the “enormously unequal” distribution of the government’s adjustment and pointed out that, while the budget and university salaries were allowed to fall in the face of inflation, “taxes were lowered for the richest” and huge benefits were granted to large companies.
The Peronist blocs in the Senate — the strongest opposition to Milei — also voted in favor of the new law. “We are discussing the survival of the university system,” said Kirchnerist senator Eduardo de Pedro (Unión por la Patria). “We are discussing whether to give funding to the public university system or whether we are going to leave millions of young people without a future,” he said.
The legislators of Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, were almost the only ones to oppose the bill. Senator Bruno Olivera, for example, pointed to the promoters of the increase proposed for universities because “they do not say how it will be financed,” which “cannot be accepted because zero deficit is not negotiable,” he said, repeating the President’s usual definitions.
With that reasoning, the Executive had already announced that it would veto the University Financing Law, as it did with the law that restored pensioners’ income. This Sunday, Milei will present to Congress his budget project for next year – there was none in 2024 – and there he is expected to reiterate that his priority is the fiscal surplus, as well as the reduction of taxes.
Calculations by the Congressional Budget Office suggest that applying the University Financing Law would require an expenditure of 0.14% of GDP. The Center for Studies on Argentine Recovery (Centro RA), which is part of the UBA, considered that this expenditure is equivalent to the tax exemptions that the Government granted to the country’s wealthiest sectors.
The single ballot
Before the debate on university funding, the government had managed to get an electoral reform approved in the Senate: the introduction of a single ballot instead of the traditional party ballots. The project had the support of the opposition in favour of dialogue and received 39 votes in favour. The 30 votes against were mostly from Peronism. But it is not yet law, because the text approved by the senators included modifications with respect to the one approved by the lower house and the deputies must decide whether to accept or reject the changes.
The Senate session had begun at 2 p.m. on Thursday and continued into the early hours of Friday. The final debate of the day threatened to deal another blow to Milei, with the possible rejection of the presidential decree that increased by 100 billion pesos (about 100 million dollars at the official exchange rate) the funds destined for the State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE). The measure has already garnered a vote against from the House of Representatives and, if the upper house ratifies it, it will be a historic event: Milei would become the first president of Argentina to have a decree rejected by the National Congress.
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