Javier Milei and his government have learned from their mistakes. Tuesday April 30, at the end of a long session which lasted almost twenty-five hours, the deputies approved the package of laws called “Bases and starting points for the freedom of Argentines”. If the government still has to pass the Senate test, the adoption of the text by the Chamber of Deputies represents the very first legislative victory since the far-right president came to power on December 10, 2023.
The voted project was presented as a lighter version of the original one, the famous “omnibus law” proposed by the Argentine executive following the inauguration of Javier Milei, but the spirit of the text remains identical. Its particular objectives are broad deregulation of the economy, a special and very advantageous tax regime for large foreign investments and the privatization of public companies. “This is a fundamental first step to get Argentina out of the quagmire in which it has found itself for several decades”welcomed the president on X.
During his first attempt, he was forced to withdraw, on February 6, his emblematic “Omnibus Law” of 664 articles after a parliamentary sequence marked by the amateurism of the executive and its 38 deputies – out of 257 what Congress matters. This time, the government secured the support of so-called opposition elected officials. “dialoguers” (open to dialogue) before submitting the text to a vote.
These deputies, mainly the 34 from the Radical Civic Union (center right), play the arbiters in a polarized Parliament, between the Peronists (named after former president Juan Domingo Peron, center left) and the left on one side , who rejected the text en bloc, and the right, which supports the measures proposed by the libertarian president.
State of “emergency” in four areas
“Compared to what happened in February, there has been an improvement on the part of the government in terms of parliamentary negotiation, explains Patricio Mouche, political consultant. He will arrive in a stronger position in the Senate, where another type of negotiation awaits him, which will depend on his relationship with the governors. » To ensure that it wins this new round, the government took care to vote on the new project chapter by chapter, and not article by article, as was the case in February. This modality, demanded in vain by the opposition, would have made it possible to limit, at least partially, the scope of the text.
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