The “Omnibus” bill, which includes a wide range of reforms, marked the political headlines in Argentina during the last days. Frenetic negotiations take place to ensure the viability of the project.
The Chamber of Deputies debates the “Omnibus” bill project sent by Javier Milei, after the negotiations of the ruling party with the friendly opposition that assured the floor of 129 deputies to enable the session.
The benches of the UCR, the PRO, Hacemos Coalición Federal and Innovation announced that they will provide a quorum and anticipated that they will vote in general on the majority opinion.
The session was awaited with uncertainty both because of the scope of the modifications to the omnibus law and because of the questions that arose about what the majority opinion was going to be about: only at 12:30 p.m., when the parliamentary secretary Tomás Figueroa He began to list the articles that were being deleted, it became known what was going to be discussed in the Chamber of Deputies.
Figueroa’s enumerations specified what survived from the majority opinion of the “Omnibus” bill: in addition to the already known removals of fiscal and political reform, the reforms on hydrocarbons were suppressed, most of those linked to security, those on the environment, the tax regime of the cold zone, the transfer of Sustainability Guarantee Funds and the fishing sector. The most important points remaining are those that the opposition always stressed were the core axes of the project: privatizations and extraordinary powers.
In this last case, the vote to unblock what is advancing is in the hands of the UCR and Hacemos Coalición Federal: sources from the two blocks confirmed that will support six extraordinary powers (it has guaranteed energy, health, and social powers), but not the privatization of 40 companies, because they emphasize that Congress must define in both chambers company by company.
The call to the venue began with delays. The deputies circulated through the halls of Congress talking with those from other blocks. A quorum was guaranteed by 137 deputies. The good news for the ruling party, in addition to the fact that its majority opinion is being addressed, is that the Independence bench – Tucumán Peronism – ratified its support for the project even after Minister Luis Caputo withdraws the fiscal chapter.
There were two surprises: the absence of two libertarian legislators at the beginning of the session and the vote of the two parliamentarians from Por Santa Cruz in favor of the project being discussed again in plenary, which Unión por la Patria requested.
The singing of the anthem, the swearing in of two new deputies, the tribute to the death of former Pampas governor Hugo Marín and an extensive list of previous interventions delayed the treatment of the articles of the bill: twelve deputies – all of them, including the radical Fernando Carbajal, would vote against the project – took the floor for reasons of privilege to criticize the irregularities in the treatment of the package of modifications, which includes the debate in only three committees, the opinion that was completed in parallel or the warnings from the Executive, without contemplating the marathon session which began with the deletion of nearly 200 articles regarding what was stated in the opinion.
A challenging debut for Martín Menem in his first session as president of the Chamber of Deputies, which included a ten-minute delay because a man insulted an opposition legislator in a strategic place in the room. The different dissident blocks were locked together: until that person was removed, the session would not continue. Menem was interrupted every time he wanted to finish a sentence.
“Boos are not tolerable, put some order and respect the word, otherwise this is a soccer field. We have three days ahead of us,” Miguel Pichetto advised him. Menem later suggested that it could be four or five days, although speculation indicated that during this Wednesday the broad outline of the project would be voted on and, during the early hours of Thursday, there would be intermediate quarters to define the most conflictive projects.
Only one other legislator who would support the bill spoke at that time: Silvia Lospenatto, from the PRO, to give her endorsement for Security to remove the agitator.
