Former President Mauricio Macri said on Thursday night that talks between his center-right PRO party and President Milei’s La Libertad Avanza on a 2027 election alliance have made no progress.
Macri told reporters at a fundraiser for children’s literacy programs on October 29, organized by María Eugenia Vidal, a former governor of Buenos Aires province, that his party’s negotiators had told him so. Deputies Fernando de Andreis and Cristian Ritondo meet every two weeks at the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, with Cabinet chief Diego Santilli, the president’s top minister, and Martín Menem, who presides over the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress.
People in the PRO blame the slow pace on the government, which they say makes an alliance depend on the party’s support for its electoral reform bill. The bill would scrap or suspend the national primaries, the open, simultaneous and compulsory contests in which parties choose their candidates, and the PRO’s Senate leader, Martín Goerling, opposes that, people around him say. Milei, for his part, shared a post on X on Friday by an economist saying presidential candidates will keep appearing every week until the cousins settle their differences, an apparent reference to Macri and his cousin Jorge Macri, who governs Buenos Aires City.
In a note to Menem dated October 27, Ritondo, who leads the PRO’s deputies, asked for seven changes to the 2027 budget. Milei’s party needs the PRO and other allies to sign the committee report, the document that sends a bill to a vote of the full chamber, and it postponed the signing on Wednesday after they withheld theirs. A PRO source said some of the seven requests are conditions for its support and others are open to discussion.
Four of the seven were already on the table: the City’s share of federal tax revenue, including a debt the note says has built up since April; a lower fuel tax, which most governors also want; public reporting on road concessions; and a cut in value-added tax on eggs to 10.5% from 21%, sought by Entre Ríos province. The government has proposed settling the City’s claim outside the budget, and the PRO wants it written in.
The other three are an extension of the incentive regimes for car and auto-parts makers, which Macri himself asked for; authorization for the City to borrow; and a clause encouraging provinces to track payments made through digital wallets such as Mercado Pago, to curb tax evasion.
Milei’s party is weighing signing the committee report on November 11 or 17. A signing on the 17th would keep a vote of the full chamber on November 18; otherwise the vote would move to November 25, a date the party has also reserved and one some allies now call the tentative target.