The president of the Chamber of Deputies, Sergio Massa, held a series of meetings on Tuesday with representatives of different opposition blocs in search of achieving greater consensus for the special session which will take place between next Thursday and Friday to discuss the agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The head of the Lower House received the parliamentary leaders of the UCR, the PRO and the Civic Coalition (which make up Together for Change), and in other meetings he did so with Radical Evolution, with the Federal interblock and with United Provinces.
The main opposition bloc (PvC) insisted on his refusal to endorse article 2 of the projectthis is the economic program proposed by the Executive Power to comply with the refinancing.
In the official caucus they see as “reasonable” that demand and in the next few hours the informal conversations will continue to try to agree on a text that is “sustainable from a technical and legal point of view,” informed sources close to that space.
However, from the Frente de Todos bloc, chaired by Germán Martínez, they seek to ensure that Together for Change stamps its signature on the majority opinion -along with the FdT- as a key to open the possibility of their demands being considered in relation to the final writing of the project.
“If Together for Change wants to introduce changes in the wording, first you have to guarantee us that you sign the majority opinion and that he is going to vote for it in general”, they repeat in the parliamentary ruling party.
It is that the Front of All comes from the bad experience of the treatment of the Budget project 2022where agreed to modifications proposals by the opposition during the debate in committee and then met with rejection to the initiative at the time of its consideration by the plenary of the Chamber.
Likewise, beyond the support or not of JxC to the majority opinion, the ruling party would already have it insured from the accompaniments of the United Provinces interblock, represented in the Budget Commission by the missionary Concord Front.
In the Federal interbloc, meanwhile, third force in the Chamber, and with two representatives in the plenary of the commissions, they are “confident that at the parliamentary level modify the wording” and insist that “the times are not so pressing”.
In this scenario, the announcement made two days ago by JxC regarding the need to approve the project to not fall into defaultratified on Tuesday by the governor of Jujuy and president of the UCR, Gerardo Morales, before the deputies.
But in addition to approval in general, the Frente de Todos is interested in the result that the vote on the questioned article 2 may have, resisted at this time by the majority of the opposition groups.
From abstentions, rejections and absences, that article, with the current wording, it could end up being approved with few votes (about 100 out of 257 total), which would give a certain weakness as a political gesture to the creditor body.
That is why the parliamentary ruling party will work in the next few hours to try to reach a synthesis that leaves the majority of the blocks in agreement.
In pursuit of adding elements for that consensus, Massa held a videoconference on Tuesday with part of the IMF staff.
For now, the committee plenary will meet again on Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. the ruling party hopes that by the end of the day the signatures begin to be stamped in the opinion.
In the schedule of the Frente de Todos, the idea of meeting on Thursday at noon to give the project half sanction is still valid.
