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One of the few things that everyone agrees on within La Moneda is that, no matter how much they try to position the concept of conviction in the idea of resorting to the Constitutional Court (TC), it is not “credible”. In the Palace there is a general dislike for the President’s commitment to having chosen to stress the relationship with Congress, instead of having sought in advance a consensus formula within the ruling party at the time when the discussion of the second withdrawal of 10% demanded. However, for reasons that are not all explained, it was preferred to wait until the last minute.
The annoyance arises from deaf ears that, both from the Presidency and from the second floor of the Palace – commanded by the chief adviser Cristián Larroulet -, was made in the face of repeated warnings from the ruling party about the political error of repeating the same script that was It applied to the processing of the first withdrawal of funds, that is, to wait for how the process was developed in Congress, without seeking to lead the discussion. A path that, they also warned, would drag Chile into a new and profound crisis.
The lack of strategy, political vision and a “new misdiagnosis” would be responsible – they accused – of the “obvious” contradictions with which the Government presents itself and which, consequently, have led to the discomfort of several authorities, which that has directly bounced off the figure of the President, Sebastián Piñera, given his condition as the first person in charge of the political leadership of his conglomerate.
The presidential decision of having waited until the last minute to resort to the TC, just three days after the bill was voted in the second process in the Senate, generated dissimilar views about what the real costs of the strategy assumed by La Moneda and respect may be. Yes, if everything went as planned, it was worth the risk that was taken, considering the weakness in which the figure of the Head of State is found.
Prior to the session of the joint Labor and Finance commission in the Senate, which determined that today the Executive’s project is voted in general and, if it succeeds, also in particular during the afternoon, there were already indications that not everything was under control . To the uncertainty about how Senators Iván Moreira, Manuel José Ossandón and RN Juan Castro will vote on the draft parliamentary initiative that has already been approved by the Chamber of Deputies and Deputies, the anticipated dismissals of the deputies (RN) Tomás Fuentes, as well as his peers Francisco Eguiguren and Álvaro Carter.
In the case of Fuentes, he warned that he was not willing to approve the project if it contained the section that bet on “self-loan”, that is, the obligation to repay the withdrawn. Beyond that, he echoed the general annoyance that indicates that “unfortunately, the original government project does not solve the problems of Chileans, it is late, it presents a very different alternative to the one we present in the Chamber”, a clear reminder that the same initiative that La Moneda decided to drag up to the TC, had the permission of its own parliamentarians.
In the case of Eguiguren, he called to return to dialogue and, to the Government, to withdraw the request before the Constitutional Court: “It is not the way to solve things,” he said. Carter, meanwhile, pointed out that “the problem is that in the end the Government is late for everything, it does not meet expectations or deliver benefits well, it is difficult to understand what the Government is doing, it is a kind of birthday, where when the birthday boy gets angry, the party is over ”.
Nor is it a minor sign that the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Diego Paulsen (RN), notified La Moneda yesterday that, after the agreement of the parliamentary committees, an institutional defense in favor of of the second withdrawal bill, which has already been approved by this branch of Congress by 130 votes in favor. In this way, the Government, once again, got fully “in a swamp” and with almost no options to explain “sensibly” to the public the reasons for its actions.
Another own goal – they acknowledged in the Palace – that once again leaves the President himself at the center of a discussion from which it is highly probable that he will be shorn, and what worries most internally in the Government, is that Piñera has less and less capital politician to emerge afloat.
But what makes many in La Moneda really uncomfortable and concerned is the permanent error in the government’s diagnosis, which on several occasions has produced totally adverse results, as was recently the belief that, after the plebiscite, Chile Vamos would be the sector that it would show unity, or that the advance of a second withdrawal of funds in Congress would not generate an internal political crisis as happened with the first project in July.
Two sides, two scenarios
In the Government there are two opposing sectors, which each have two different scenarios, which do not coincide on how the Piñerista administration “is driving the ship” and which, to a large extent, constitutes the reason for the multiple disagreements between their own ministers.
A sector of the Government speaks of the “extreme” risk that La Moneda chose, since, if the worst case scenario occurs – that is, the first project is approved and the one presented in parallel is rejected -, the President simply it would be “adrift”, with a very low degree of credibility among its people, which would complicate any type of coordinated management in the short and medium term. This, added to a citizen approval that reaches at most 16%, according to the latest Criteria survey, exacerbates the lame duck syndrome to extreme levels and the feeling in the ruling party that in an election year “it is not business to appear with the Government ”.
Another group raises a second less dramatic scenario, because, if Piñera “got shorn” due to the failure of the heavy-handed strategy that he applied since last week, this would not imply a great political fall, since he is already “on the ground” and , therefore, the risk would be controlled. But even among those who agree with this reading, there are also objections in the sense that the President continues to act as if the plebiscite of October 25 had never existed and under the logic of wanting to recover at any cost the depth of the traditional right-wing electorate, which implies governing to wink at the “more traditional” wing of the coalition, at the cost of putting an institution already questioned, such as the TC, in a dilemma for a problem whose solution has always been political.
Not for nothing, the maneuvering of the withdrawal project itself and resorting to the TC responds to the request made by the bank heads of Chile Vamos, linked to the toughest sector of the ruling party and which was with the Rejection. If not – they stressed – it would not be explained that both José Antonio Kast and the UDI helmsman, Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, “have all been silent this time.”
Palacio sources affirmed that the outlook is complex, since senators Moreira, Ossandón and Castro have already notified the Government of the difficulty of rejecting the bill that the Chamber dispatched, mainly due to the fact that La Moneda acted out of time and that forced them to make their position public and, consequently, that the cost of “turning around” now would be too high. Likewise, the three senators would have compromised their votes for the government project.
It is possible that both bills, that of the deputies and the Executive, are approved in the Senate at the same time, to await the resolution of the TC on the first and, also, in case the Court Constitutionally rejects the Government’s requirement, it would be forced to withdraw its initiative, a possibility that nobody wants to imagine.
Given the adverse scenario they face, it is already clear that, in order to save the presidential initiative and avoid a defeat of the current strategy, they are willing to make a series of concessions so that said project does not fail and, therefore, the only one The point that would maintain the category of “sacred” is the payment of taxes on the highest salaries, since that is the justification that has been given to citizens these days, to cover the political deficit implicit in their actions.
Although the official defense of Palacio claims that limits had to be set, and that the fact of having reached the TC would at least establish the position that indicates that it would be acting unconstitutionally, the internal noise that the decision left has several –They confided– with their nerves on edge.
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