After failing to get opposition votes, Javier Milei backtracks on his mega-deregulatory law and may call for a referendum

Javier Milei decided to withdraw his mega-deregulatory law from Congress. Less than 24 hours after opposition deputies prevented voting on some key articles, the president of Argentina decided to back out of his first major legislation.

On Tuesday night, the Argentine president decided to return his bill to the committee to continue negotiating with the opposition so that it may be approved sooner or later. However, on Wednesday, it became known that he would withdraw the legislation from Congress. The person in charge of giving the news was Oscar Zago, head of the deputies' block of La Libertad Avanza, the ruling party.

Argentine legislators rejected the first law of the most-voted president in the country's history, which led Milei to suggest on social media the possibility of calling for a referendum on the legislation as he reposted comments of this kind.

Milei had already anticipated during the campaign that he could opt for that option in case of opposition in Congress.

Milei, who is still traveling in Israel, talked to TN to clarify his position on the situation. Regarding the 'Ley Bases', he pointed out that "I am not interested in continuing to deal with it, the caste was evident."

"Those who vote against these reforms fill their mouths talking about the poor and helping the poor, that is why I say that leftist progressives talk so much about the poor that the only thing they do is to multiply them, it is like King Midas, but in reverse, King Midas everything he touched turned it into gold, everything a leftist touches turns into poverty," he added.

What happened to Milei's mega deregulation law?

After weeks of negotiations, the Minister of the Interior, Guillermo Francos, and the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Martín Menem, negotiated with the opposition to pass the Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of the Argentines law in the Lower House. Despite being a legislative minority, the government gathered 144 votes in favor of approving the text in general, in the absence of the article-by-article vote according to local rules.

However, it turns out that, before the vote in particular, the executive had negotiated the necessary votes to approve the key articles related to delegated powers and privatizations without having to go through Congress. However, hours later, those same deputies inexplicably voted against it, forcing Milei's government to reverse the legislation and send it back to the committee.

Less than 24 hours later, the president gave the order to withdraw the law definitively from the Chamber of Deputies since he understood the opposition deputies would distort it.

The presidential spokesman, Manuel Adorni, assured that "the agreement that existed before the session was violated," so the solution was not to risk the law entirely. "We were not going to allow the law to be gambled with and that they were destroying article by article (...) We are going to go ahead. When politics understands what Argentina needs, the law will be discussed again and what the people asked for will be done again: a different Argentina (...) Part of the politics is not up to the circumstances in a country that is falling apart," he added in a dialogue with LN+.