The head of the Buenos Aires Government, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, and former President Mauricio Macri starred in a week marked by crossed messages in the internal party, in a dispute heading to 2023 that has already begun to be waged openly in the Buenos Aires suburbs, the main district country’s election.
Although there are still no certainties as to whether Macri will finally be a candidate for the Casa Rosada next year, what is clear is that the former president does not want to lose his centrality in the electoral process.
That is why this week he reappeared in La Plata, where he toured works on the El Gato stream, which allowed that area of the Buenos Aires capital to no longer be flooded.
Macri was accompanied on his tour by local mayor Julio Garro; the former governor María Eugenia Vidal and the national deputy Cristian Ritondo.
Vidal has been touring the country as a presidential candidate with the permission of Macri (this week he was in Córdoba), while Ritondo is the former governor’s chosen one to be his candidate in the province.
They represent the non-alignment with the candidacy of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, who continues to bet in the province on Diego Santilli as the eventual successor of Axel Kicillof.
Given this emergence of Macri on the scene, which follows another appearance he made a few weeks ago in Lanús together with the local mayor Néstor Grindetti -another candidate for governor outside the Larretista radar- the head of government marked the court with several actions.
On the one hand, he presented a plan to the City so that citizens can be candidates. The initiative, called Open Lists, will allow 34 people who have never ventured into politics to join the lists of Buenos Aires legislators and community members in the future.
The initiative was obviously questioned by the “hawks” of the PRO, referenced in Patricia Bullrich, who clarified that no one had consulted them.
Rodríguez Larreta also counterattacked by making a show of force in Pilar, where he met with some 30 PRO leaders from the first and third electoral sections, where the largest number of voters in the national election are concentrated.
These municipalities -among them Quilmes, Ituzaingó, Hurlingham, Lomas de Zamora, Berazategui, José C. Paz, among others- are key in the presidential strategy of the mayor of Buenos Aires and they are municipalities where Together today is opposition.
In numbers, the candidates and referents of the municipalities not governed by Together of the first and third electoral section of Buenos Aires represent 49% of the votes obtained by the space in 2021
The 30 municipalities that make up the first and third sections where Together is the opposition represent 56.38% of the electoral roll of the province of Buenos Aires and add up to 48.73% of the votes for Together in the 2021 general elections.
In the Larretista troops they continue to think that Macri will not finally play in the presidential election, but that he will try to condition the mayor of Buenos Aires as much as possible in his attempt for the PRO to have a formula as similar as possible to what the former president interprets as the idea of ” change”.
In the next few days, this “battle” will have an impasse: Rodríguez Larreta is traveling on a tour to Israel, where he will appear as a presidential candidate in a destination where his Buenos Aires candidate, Diego Santilli, was recently.
Macri, meanwhile, will also be out of the country in the next few days heading to the Caribbean, where he will give scheduled talks in Puerto Rico and other destinations in that region.
