To win the same PASO numbers, Miley will be in the minority to make her fixes

(CNN Spanish) – And if Javier Miley, the presidential candidate with the most votes in Argentina’s recent primaries, can confirm this trend with his victory in the general elections scheduled for October 22, then as eventual president he will have to contend with a House of Representatives in which he will have Only 31% of what is needed for a quorum and in the Senate with 22%, according to forecasts by CNN and Argentine media data specialists.

Currently, none of the three parties or coalitions that received the most votes in the primaries have the “magic number”, that is, the quorum to start the session. This figure in the House of Representatives is 129 and in the Senate 37, that is, half plus one.

In the House of Representatives, the pro-government Union for the Homeland bloc has 118 seats; the opposition coalition together for change 117; And La Libertad Avanza, by Javier Maile, 2.

If the initial results are repeated, the composition of the House of Representatives will change, but not enough to give Miley the majority she needs to implement the agenda she promised. The official bloc will lose 38 seats, leaving 94 seats; The number of “Together for Change” will drop to 107; And La Libertad Avanza will increase its size to 40 deputies.

This distribution again assumes that no block contains a so-called “magic number”. The strange thing, though, is that the party of the presidential candidate with the most votes in the primaries will not have as many representatives. On the one hand, it will register significant growth because it will rise from 2 legislators to 40. On the other hand, this last number is only enough to cover 31% of what is necessary to obtain a quorum.

In the Senate, Juntos por el Cambio today has 33 seats, while the ruling party’s two blocs total 31, and there is no representation for the libertarians.

If the PASO results are replicated, it will be: Together for Change 27 Senators, Union for the Homeland 33, and La Libertad Avanza 8.

Javier Miley at the National Convention of Argentina, March 1, 2023. (Photo: Anita Pouchard Serra/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

This last number also shows liberal growth in the Senate as it will go from zero to 8. However, this number of senators is small when considering how far it is from the quorum (37 senators). That is, it will cover 22% of what is necessary to activate the session.

CNN consulted Javier Miley’s campaign team about how he governs a Congress whose numbers don’t make him any easier. One of his spokesmen replied that Miley would “break the bi-coalition logic” and get more lawmakers from smaller blocs and from the more conservative sector in Together for Change.

The important point is that liberal proposals such as the dollarization of the Argentine economy or reforms to the public health and education system must be approved by the legislature. Therefore, political negotiation, dialogue and the search for consensus with other political forces, which Milli contemptuously classifies as a “class”, appear to be vital tools for putting the parliamentary mechanism into practice.

Miley has brought to the table the possibility of calling plebiscites, if he were president, to circumvent his potential minority status in Congress, particularly on controversial issues such as funding for education and repeal of abortion legalization. However, some legal experts have already warned that using popular advice has legal and constitutional limits, so it’s not clear if this might be his magic wand.