The PRO, founded 20 years ago by former President Mauricio Macri, is fighting to stay alive. Since Javier Milei’s victory in the general elections last November, the party has been going through a deep identity crisis since Patricia Bullrich, the party’s former presidential candidate, joined the ranks of the far-right government without any reservations. Bullrich is Milei’s Minister of Security and proposes a merger between PRO and La Libertad Avanza, the ruling party. Macri supports Milei due to ideological proximity, but he wants nothing to do with handing over without anything in return a political structure that in 2015 became the first alternative of the liberal right to Peronism since the return to democracy in 1983. The meeting held on Thursday to elect authorities for the party Assembly staged the rupture: Bullrich’s representatives left the meeting shouting and Macri’s representatives imposed their man.
Patricia Bullrich is a political tightrope walker. In the seventies she was a member of Montoneros, the guerrilla group of revolutionary Peronism; in 2000 she was Minister of Labor and then of Security for the social democrat Fernando de la Rúa; in 2015 she turned a little further to the right and joined the Macri government, in the Security portfolio; in 2023 she consummated her ultra turn from the same position, but for Milei. Today she is at the head of the PRO sector that promotes a merger of PRO with Libertad Avanza in view of the legislative elections of 2025. In a letter that she published on social media before the Assembly this Thursday, she asked her party for “a debate on direction.” According to her reading, the 6.2 million votes she received in the first round of last year’s presidential elections went to Milei in the second round. Those votes, wrote Bullrich, were the mandate for “a real change, without half measures and definitive.” “We decided to support Javier Milei because if change did not happen now, we would have sunk,” added the minister.
The recipient of the message was Macri. The former president supported Milei from day one, arguing that the failure of his government was due to the delay in implementing the State adjustment that the ultra-president is now promoting without anesthesia. He flirted at first with a joint government with the libertarian, offering leaders with management experience and unconditional support in Congress. But Milei had other plans: he added dozens of former Macri officials, but did not take any steps towards a political agreement with the former president. In the Casa Rosada they consider that they already won the PRO votes in the last elections and that only a merger is possible. Macri finally lost patience.
This Wednesday, he launched his first public criticism against Milei. He demanded that she comply with the Supreme Court ruling that orders the national government to return to the city of Buenos Aires, governed by his cousin, Jorge Macri, the part of the distribution of the shared tax that was withheld during the administration of Peronist Alberto Fernández. Macri’s support was fundamental for Milei to achieve the approval of the Ley Bases in Congress on June 28, with which the president intends to dismantle the State. But the former president does not feel reciprocated. “There is a prior condition even more important than creating new laws, and that is to comply with the existing ones, especially, to comply with the irrevocable rulings issued by the Supreme Court,” Macri told Milei.
The former president simultaneously activated a strategy to remove Bullrrich from the leadership of the party. First he limited her involvement in the Board of Directors; then he appointed one of his own to the leadership of the PRO in the province of Buenos Aires, the most populated and richest in the country; now he managed to ensure that the minister’s sector did not remain at the head of the Assembly. It is a symbolic victory, but also a strategic one: it is the Assembly that decides on possible alliances with other groups, in this case La Libertad Avanza.
Bullrich has said, at least for now, that she has no plans to leave the party for which she was a presidential candidate less than a year ago. It remains to be seen whether this means that she will maintain the unity of the block of 37 deputies that the PRO has in the House of Representatives, enough to be the second minority after Kirchnerist Peronism, with 101. Milei, in a crusade against the political “caste”, has managed in less than seven months to get Macri and Bullrich to break up after years of political coexistence.
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