On the crying injustice of denying María Verónica Michelli a bench for which the government had nominated her on the…

Tomorrow’s Día del Periodista is all the more reason to protest the crying injustice of denying María Verónica Michelli the bench for which the government had nominated her on the grounds that her brother-in-law Hugo Alconada Mon is a journalist ventilating cases of corruption affecting President Javier Milei’s administration. A reprisal which needs to be seen as indirect press censorship because it sends out loud and clear the message that not only the journalists themselves but also their families will suffer if their professional work irks a government which calls itself libertarian.

Even if unashamed of such despotic extremes, the government should repent this arbitrary initiative because it could be shooting itself in the foot politically. Senator Patricia Bullrich has just been handed a golden opportunity to consolidate her opinion poll lead over President Milei or any other libertarian by registering her dissent with this blatant injustice, thus potentially replacing the original “iron triangle” (between Milei, his sister Karina and star spin doctor Santiago Caputo) with a quadrangle or even a new triangle. This dissent can only be hailed as a positive evolution within the government because any militant complaint that it opens cracks in libertarian solidarity is nullified by the far more destructive factional infighting already undermining governance.

Senator Bullrich followed up her dissent by offering President Milei her resignation from the ruling party caucus chair (rejected for now) and her new stance opens up new problems in an upper house nominally headed by Vice-President Victoria Villarruel (persona non grata at last month’s official celebration of the May 25 anniversary of the birth of nationhood). Not every libertarian is resolving the conflict between common sense and party loyalty presented by the Michelli case in favour of the latter, which is not even a criterion for those Radical, Peronist and provincial senators who have previously voted for the government on numerous occasions. There is also an institutional problem if a judicial nomination given majority approval by a Senate committee is now belatedly quashed by the government. On the Senate front at least, a female triangle of Bullrich, Karina Milei and Villarruel is looking very fragmented.

This vendetta against independent journalism has been universally attributed to Presidential Chief-of-Staff Karina Milei but it also leaves her acolyte Juan Bautista Mahiques, who was appointed Justice Minister just three months ago, in a bad light. Just when he had been handed a temporary reprieve for his complacency towards the financial shenanigans of Argentine Football Association (AFA) bosses Claudio ‘Chiqui’ Tapia and Pablo Toviggino with the World Cup starting this coming Thursday, he has now been wrongfooted into nixing Michelli’s nomination after having endorsed it twice – not only now as minister but also in an earlier capacity as government representative on the Council of Magistrates. In thus contradicting himself, Mahiques is abdicating the moderating role now being assumed by Bullrich, thus making his presence in the portfolio pointless.

Instead of observing silence in the hope that a new scandal (such as the millions of dollars and drugs found last weekend in the Palermo flat of Facundo Leal, a government official at the start of this year) comes along to send the wrongful discrimination against Michelli into oblivion, the minister’s father Carlos Mahiques had no better idea than to propose that all members of the judicial branch should be sanctioned for supplying any information to journalists when the Supreme Court has a Communications Office specifically for the purpose of informing the press. The patriarch may well have torpedoed his son’s drive to become Prosecutor-General in the reformed judicial system where investigation is to be entrusted to the prosecutors instead of the examining magistrates according to the Code Napoleon tradition.

Nor can Mahiques count on the World Cup letting him off the hook for the next several weeks because the financial irregularities of Tapia and Toviggino are also being investigated in the courts of the United States venue of the tournament where millions of dollars have allegedly been laundered. The government thus does not have the monopoly on blowing hot and cold over this case according to convenience, as it has been doing throughout this year. Nevertheless, there remains every reason to suppose that US judges will hold back on drastic decisions in this case until after the World Cup is over rather than be party-poopers in a tournament where Milei’s Argentina is likely to do well.

In any event, this country will be inhabiting a whole new universe with a whole new agenda as from Thursday. ​

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