Patricia Bullrich, who leads the governing party’s senators, said the effort to scrap Argentina’s national party primaries must succeed by the end of December, because electoral rules are not changed in an election year.
“In election years electoral laws are not changed. That is a concept accepted in politics,” she told Infobae on Thursday. She said the effort has to come as soon as possible and no later than the end of December. She said suspending the primaries for 2027 or abolishing them would amount to roughly the same thing for changing the 2027 rules.
The primaries, known as PASO, are the open, simultaneous and compulsory contests in which every party’s candidates are chosen before the general election. Changing electoral law takes an absolute majority, 37 of the 72 senators, and the government has fallen short of that count so far.
Bullrich was cautious about the claim by Diego Santilli, the cabinet chief and the president’s top minister, that the votes are there. “Diego is a habitual optimist, he always tells you everything is fine,” she said. She sees senators daily, she said, and after Milei took governors to Paris this month it looked as if everything was settled. “And it wasn’t quite like that,” she added.
Some senators, including government allies, now expect the debate to move to extraordinary sessions next year, the sessions a president calls outside Congress’s regular period. People around Santilli estimate approval by February or March at the latest.