The dance of candidates for next year’s elections both in the city and in the province of Buenos Aires once again heats up the internal background between Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and Mauricio Macri heading to the 2023 presidential elections.
Although the ex-president is still uncertain about whether he himself will be a candidate, the truth is that he plays politically intensely, consecrating different candidates in each of the districts.
Buenos Aires province
In the Buenos Aires district, Considered the “mother of all battles” by concentrating almost 40% of the national register, this week the front that proposes Cristian Ritondo as a pre-candidate for Buenos Aires governor in opposition to Diego Santilli was consolidatedthe applicant endorsed by Larreta.
During the week, Ritondo launched together with his technical teams in Pinamar, in a few working days shared with the deputy María Eugenia Vidal, who also promotes him, and also received the support of Macri and Patricia Bullrich, who sent two separate videos of back.
After the meeting in Pinamar, and to make it clear, Macri received Ritondo together with the national deputy Hernán Lombardi and the Buenos Aires deputy Axel Campbell last Thursdayaware that the photos in politics speak for themselves.
Larretismo responded to the movement with the most tours through the Buenos Aires suburbs of both the head of Government and Santilli himself.
On Thursday, Larreta and Santilli showed up in Merlo, west of the suburbs, where they toured the center of the municipality and participated in a meeting with 80 residents.
That same day, before visiting Merlo, Larreta was in San Fernando with councilor Agustina Ciarletta, with whom she shared a meeting with neighbors, as well as a meeting with businessmen from the SME sector.
The dispute between the two PRO sectors takes place municipality by municipality, in each of the 135 communes into which the province of Buenos Aires is divided.
Santilli was the one who started the race first and has already traveled the district several times, but later other suitors joined, such as the mayor of Lanús Néstor Grindetti, also close to Macri, and now Ritondo, who had been feinting and finally made his launch.
In Buenos Aires city
No less intense is the inmate of the PRO in the capital due to the succession of Larreta.
The current head of government prefers not to bless anyone and lets everyone who wants to sign up play.
Jorge Macri, current Buenos Aires government minister, is one of those launched in the race, and in recent days he received explicit support from Bullrich, which did not go down very well with Larreta.
In addition, the larretismo sees Macri (Jorge) as a Buenos Aires representative of his cousin Mauricio, so they do not finish raising their hand.
In parallel, other potential pre-candidates arise, such as the Minister of Education of CABA Soledad Acuña, who, although she has been working with Larreta for years, maintains a good relationship with former President Macri, with whom she has already met five times this year, the last one last Friday. .
In that meeting, Macri and Acuña “reviewed surveys, discussed the electoral future in the City and agreed that the PRO must have a competitive option to retain the district,” according to the sources of the space.
Macri told Acuña that “due to his track record and capacity” he has “everything to offer an interesting proposal for the City”, and he defended his status as “pure PRO”,
Although Macri has already publicly stated that he supports his cousin Jorge, former mayor of Vicente López, for the City, it is clear that he also encourages Acuña.
On the other hand, the Buenos Aires fight has another protagonist in the national senator Martín Lousteau, Larreta’s partner in the Buenos Aires government (he manages several ministries and Banco Ciudad), but who, in the eyes of many Larretistas, has the problem, precisely, of not being “pure PRO”.
It is in this search for candidates of the “Horacio stick”, as they say on Uspallata street, that the head of government has even speculated with the figure of Emmanuel Ferrario, 1st vice president of the Legislature and trusted man of the mayor, so that also joins the Buenos Aires dispute.