Macri Cooks Eggs and the K's Get Burned: The Video That Angers Kirchnerists and Libertarians

What if Mauricio Macri pulls a Jorge Abelardo Ramos and gives Karina Milei a taste of her own medicine in next year’s elections? The President’s sister wants to revive collective lists and is wooing governors to field their own legislative candidates, but under a unified ballot that ensures Milei’s reelection. On that board, the former president moves his pieces with a move that already has history.

Jump back 53 years: Colorado Ramos was then a highly creative leader and intellectual of the seventies left. His impact at the polls was insignificant, but the media paid attention to his antics. He had the brilliant idea of «accompanying» the candidacy of Juan Domingo Perón, backed by Frejuli in the September 1973 elections, but with his own ballot from his tiny Popular Left Front. That allowed him to snatch almost 900,000 votes from the Peronist alliance, an unthinkable number for his group. His marketing was perfect: he invited people to vote for Peronism, but from a more progressive stance. Many believed him, including Cristina Kirchner, who in 2013 publicly confessed that she had voted for the Peronist leader with Ramos’s ballot.

That the PRO has its own presidential candidate next year not only exposes it to defeat but also, by splitting the right-wing vote, makes it easier for a unified Peronism to win. If Macri supporters encourage voting for Milei with a PRO ballot, it could recreate the «Ramos effect,» giving their most loyal electorate the chance to reelect the libertarian, albeit with a mandate to be more moderate. Will the Mileis be as pragmatic as Perón to understand that this is an advantage that would benefit them anyway? Of course, there’s a little problem: it was Mauricio Macri himself who banned the use of collective lists in 2019. But nothing that good political maneuvering can’t solve.

Macri doesn’t have the linear mind of a traditional politician. That’s why, among his musings, football, bridge, and, until recently, the search for a new female companion after his marriage to Juliana Awada, all intertwine perfectly. And he found her: her name is Dolores Teuly. On his way to the stadium to watch the painful match between Argentina and Cape Verde, in his head full of varied interests, the also executive president of the FIFA Foundation assured himself with certainty that he does not intend to be a presidential candidate next year. What he does not give up is his role as a key player on the political board.

There are times when Argentina’s self-proclaimed progressives harbor more anger toward Macri than toward Milei. It’s counterfactual, but if in the second round of the 2023 presidential elections, instead of Massa, Patricia Bullrich had faced Milei, part of the shameful nac&pop vote would likely have ended up in the libertarian leader’s saddlebags. Recall that for the first round, the Massa-Kirchnerist camp gave valuable resources and poll watchers to the libertarian to knock the Macri supporters and their allies out of the game. The stratagem worked, but it backfired on them in the runoff, and Milei took the victory.

The hatred those sectors have for the former president was very noticeable in the past week, following the viral spread of a twelve-minute clip that shows him from a more human and empathetic angle, sharing a day in his life with a twenty-something reporter from Olga, one of the most-watched and popular streaming channels among young audiences. In the video circulating on social media, Macri is seen doing Pilates and cooking scrambled eggs at home for breakfast, among other private activities. The one who achieved this was the laid-back YouTuber Valen Rizzuti.

Kirchnerists and Milei supporters became furious on social media, labeling it a «collaborative video» or «bleach operation,» worried that popular sympathy for Macri might grow again from this incursion. Lest he, instead of pulling a Ramos, wants to pull a Trump and, despite denying it, go for a second term. Almost as if the K’s are more worried about that possibility than about Milei’s reelection. Macri, meanwhile, remains unfazed and laughs at those who think what he did for Olga is something new for him in search of I don’t know what. Thirty years ago, he already enjoyed frequently joining the proposals made to him on Marcelo Tinelli’s show. The Eternauta was right: «Old stuff works.»

WATCH THE VIDEO: