Omnibus law giving Miley superpowers passes its first vote in Argentine Congress

Signed this Friday, 54 days after Javier Miley took power in Argentina, His first political victory: The Chamber of Deputies gives preliminary approval by a wide margin to the omnibus bill, which grants the President superpowers on various matters without having to go through Congress and allows the sale of more than twenty companies. . State. The board ended with 144 affirmative votes and 109 negative votes.

Following this decision, a vote on the broader articles is still pending, which has been postponed until Tuesday, when Congress will reopen to continue the session, which began at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday and will continue on Thursday and Friday. Continued. This is the longest plenary meeting in recent memory.

Voting on articles, as explained here, is a long and cumbersome process. Once the article-by-article vote is finished, the bill will be sent to the Senate, which must go through a similar process to become law.

This megaproject has been highly discussed and is not the same as the one that the Casa Rosada sent to Congress: from 664 articles it has been reduced to 386, that is, a 40% reduction in its original volume. This is because, among dozens of other measures rejected by the opposition, the electoral reform and the entire fiscal package were withdrawn by the decision of Economy Minister Luis Caputo, who argued that, in this way, the approval of the rest of the text would be leafy.

The approval of Miley’s omnibus law was possible only due to the support of a large part of the opposition: PRO, which is an affiliate of La Libertad Avanza (LLA); UCR, we form the federal coalition (diverse bloc headed by Miguel Pichetto) and about twenty representatives from provincial places. LLA is a very young force, with Congress having only 38 seats, i.e. 15 percent of the total.

In the final hours, concessions were made as the dialogue opposition gave its support to the amendments: the specific presidential superpower on fiscal issues was definitively withdrawn and the process of privatization of public companies was made more flexible. With regard to this last point, the block of public companies subject to privatization that appeared in the original project was divided into groups, to give partners the freedom to support some and reject others in a special vote.

On Thursday, the second day of the session, security forces moved in with water trucks, rubber bullets and pepper spray to push back protesters protesting in Congress Square against the executive’s resolution. About twenty people, including protesters and press workers, were injured in the protocol directed by the security minister, Patricia Bullrich., However, in public statements Bullrich acknowledged that “no serious incidents occurred” and stressed that his management would continue to “maintain public order”.

At the beginning of the third day, many opposition representatives rejected the actions of the security forces, while the operation was defended by liberal party representatives. The presidential spokesman, Manuel Adorni, highlighted the “titanic work” of the security forces at his regular press conference. He said eight arrests were made for the incidents. and assured that anyone “who violates the law will be punished.”