Javier Milei has crashed into the Argentine Congress, which is made up of two chambers: Deputies and Senate. In a decision unprecedented since the return to democracy in 1983, the Senate overturned in the early hours of this Friday a presidential decree of necessity and urgency (DNU) that granted 100,000 million pesos (about 100 million dollars at the official exchange rate; 90.1 million euros) to the State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE). In the same session, the legislators reversed by law the budget adjustment that the far-right party is applying to public universities. These were two very hard blows for the president. Milei has already announced that he will veto the university financing law by decree, considering that it undermines his policy of reducing the fiscal deficit. But now he must take note that the opposition, even the one considered “dialogue-oriented”, has enough votes in both chambers of Congress to annul the presidential DNU.
It is common for Argentine presidents to use decrees of necessity and urgency to bypass Congress, especially if they are in a minority like Milei. Néstor Kirchner signed 236 DNU in the four years of his mandate; Carlos Menem, 196 in a decade; Alberto Fernández, 177 in four years and Cristina Kirchner, 78 in her two terms. The liberal Mauricio Macri, an ally of Milei, put his signature on 71 DNU during his four-year government. None of these decrees was annulled by Parliament. Until now.
The decree granting extra money to the SIDE had already been overturned by the Chamber of Deputies in August. The Senate was missing, which did the same on Friday with 49 votes in favor, 11 against and two abstentions. All Peronists, the senators of the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) and also those of Pro, Macri’s party, an ally of the Casa Rosada, voted for the annulment. The former president has raised the price of his parliamentary support, upset with Milei’s reluctance to allow Pro officials to enter the government.
In a statement, the President’s Office called the senators “irresponsible” and accused them of leaving the Argentine intelligence system “without resources at a historic moment for the country.” “They will have to take responsibility for any incident that occurs until the SIDE is properly funded and can recover its vital capabilities,” the statement said. The opposition, on the other hand, fears that Milei will use the intelligence services to persecute opposition politicians and journalists.
Money for universities
The legislative session had started with bad news for Milei with the approval of the University Financing Law (57 votes in favor and 11 against), which had already been successfully passed by the House of Representatives in August. The law orders the Executive to recompose the budget of the higher education system and the salaries of its professors, cut by Milei, as well as to continue updating them this year according to the evolution of inflation. The Government had already announced that, if approved, it would veto the law. It will be Milei’s second veto, after paralyzing the increase in pensions promoted by Congress. In both cases he has used the same argument: they are rules that threaten fiscal balance.
The debate in the Upper House was followed from the outskirts of Congress by unions of teachers and students who mobilized, together with academic authorities, to support the bill. With their protests, the university community already managed to stop Milei’s drastic cuts in April and now, with parliamentary support, they have taken a step to try to recover the lost funds.
The 57 national universities, where some two million students study, are among the sectors of the State most affected by Milei’s adjustment. The university system’s budget suffered a real drop of 31.5% compared to 2023, warned researchers from the Interdisciplinary Institute of Political Economy of the University of Buenos Aires. The purchasing power of the salaries of professors and university workers fell by a similar percentage (33.3%), indicates a report from the Universities of San Martín and Río Negro. “More than 85% of university teachers are below the poverty line,” says that report.
The law approved this Thursday by the Senate declares a budgetary emergency for the university system during this year. In addition, it tells the Executive that it must update the appropriations for the operation of universities according to the accumulated inflation – between November and July it reached 134.5% – and then implement a bi-monthly increase in accordance with the evolution of the Consumer Price Index. And it applies the same criteria to recompose the salaries of professors and non-teaching workers, with a monthly update.
The debate
The law was created by a bill submitted by legislators from the Radical Civic Union (UCR), one of the opposition forces that has shown itself to be open to dialogue with the government, but which has a strong tradition of supporting public universities. In arguing for his vote in favor, Senator Martín Lousteau, president of the UCR, questioned the “enormously unequal” distribution of the government’s adjustments and pointed out that, while the budget and university salaries were allowed to fall in the face of inflation, “taxes were lowered for the richest” and huge benefits were granted to large companies.
The legislators of La Libertad Avanza, Milei’s party, were almost alone in their opposition to the bill. Senator Bruno Olivera, for example, pointed to the promoters of the proposed increase for universities because “they do not say how it will be financed”: “It cannot be accepted because zero deficit is not negotiable,” he said, repeating a common expression of the president.
This Sunday, Milei will present to Congress his budget project for 2025 — there was none this year — and there he is expected to reiterate that his priority is the fiscal surplus, as well as tax reduction.
Calculations by the Congressional Budget Office suggest that applying the University Financing Law would require an expenditure of 0.14% of GDP. The Center for Studies on Argentine Recovery (Centro RA), which is part of the UBA, considered that this expenditure is equivalent to the tax exemptions that the Government granted to the country’s wealthiest sectors.
The single ballot
Before the debate on university funding and the veto of the presidential decree, the government had managed to get an electoral reform approved in the Senate: the introduction of a single ballot instead of the traditional party ballots. The project had the support of the opposition in favor of dialogue and received 39 votes in favor. The 30 votes against were mostly from Peronism. But it is not yet law, because the text approved by the senators included modifications with respect to the one approved by the lower house and the deputies must decide whether to accept or reject the changes.
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