Manuel Adorni lost by his own rules. He was forced out in installments, in a process set in motion from the day he confessed to being a tax evader and tried to justify his sudden economic well-being with an old investment in cryptocurrencies.
Over two weeks, he shed shreds of the power he had come to taste during his brief adventure in big-time politics. It lasted as long as it took Javier Milei to realize that keeping his Chief of Cabinet was not the display of authority he thought, but a burden that could trigger an institutional crisis with potentially disastrous repercussions in the markets.
Milei boarded the presidential plane heading to Spain on Wednesday thinking he could still keep Adorni, with the emotionality of someone trying to rescue a highly sentimental object from a fire. His sister Karina stayed in Buenos Aires. She had already conveyed to trusted officials that the replacement was inevitable.
She got involved in negotiations to thwart the call for interpellation and the eventual motion of censure that the opposition was pushing in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. Patricia Bullrich, the main activist behind Adorni’s resignation, worked hard to prevent a libertarian Waterloo while, in parallel, she told the president’s sister that she could only buy her a week to make the replacement peacefully. Governance was at risk.
Those were days of extreme confusion within the ruling party. Adorni played the survivor’s choreography. On Tuesday, two delegations of senators from La Libertad Avanza (LLA) visited him, and he tried to pump them up to defend him. Karina posed in photos to give meaning to the gesture. From those talks, a self-justifying phrase from the official leaked, spread by at least two attendees: «I didn’t pay taxes, but I’m not a thief. I didn’t evade more because I couldn’t.» More than one choked, even though they are used to applauding Milei when he says «all taxes are theft.»
On Wednesday, during the session of the Chamber of Deputies, Karina Milei celebrated from a box the approval of the so-called Super RIGI, but had to endure the Kirchnerists chanting in a rabble-rousing tone: «Where is Adorni? / Where is Adorni?» From the libertarian benches, a reaction erupted that aged poorly: «Adorni is not leaving! / Adorni is not leaving!»
The replacement was cooking slowly. By then, Adorni seemed like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense: the only one who didn’t know he was dead was him.
Only Milei needed to be convinced. He resisted moving from his promise not to «execute an innocent» under media pressure. Against all advice, the President publicly endorsed for three and a half months each of the implausible explanations Adorni gave about his recent economic prosperity. Letting him go would be costly. Not doing so could be much worse.
He had already endorsed stripping Adorni of the presidential spokesperson role and appointing Adrián Ravier there. He also agreed to appoint a new media secretary, Fabián Fernández. It was announced 10 days ago, right after the interview with José Del Rio in which Adorni explained the origins of his fortune. «Nobody believed him; it became urgent to give the Government a new voice,» a Casa Rosada source summarized at the time. Political management had long been delegated to Diego Santilli, who from the Ministry of the Interior quietly rowed to sustain the libertarian government’s precarious alliance system.
Ravier was introduced last Monday with feigned naturalness. On his first day in office, he took a photo with Adorni that conveyed a curiosity: the Chief of Cabinet’s desk was stripped of objects. It didn’t seem fitting for someone who works their tail off.
On Tuesday, Milei celebrated the failure of the session called by the Kirchnerists in the Chamber of Deputies to push for Adorni’s removal. The price of doing nothing, however, rose with each passing hour. Pro allies erupted in internal revolt for lending themselves to the game of giving the Government time to manage the replacement. Bullrich insisted: «In the Senate, they’ll cook him.» Adorni challenged her and announced he planned to appear on July 2 to give his management report in the upper house. «It will be suicide,» the senator insisted.
On Wednesday night, Milei left for Spain with the decision on how to proceed pending. As soon as he landed in Madrid, with little sleep, he gave an interview in which he insisted: «I back my ministers to the bitter end.» He defended his friend’s «honesty.» But he introduced a nuance for the first time. He said that if the courts proved any crime against Adorni, he would kick him out «with a boot.»
Perhaps he spoke overwhelmed by doubt. Bullrich had told Karina that she could no longer do anything to prevent the Senate from launching next Thursday the process to remove Adorni. How would the markets react to what would be read as an institutional crisis: the first time in history that a constitutional mechanism would be applied to remove the coordinating minister? How would the alliances broken by the vote in those sessions be rebuilt? How would the spectacle of Adorni narrating the odyssey of his progress in Congress impact the presidential image?
On Friday, unconditional support ran out. Ravier had scheduled his presentation to journalists and went out to bat without answers to give. «This is not a press conference,» he anticipated, in an involuntary homage to Magritte. He stood at Adorni’s podium and read even his name and age from the paper where he had his inaugural speech written.
Almost simultaneously, it was revealed that Adorni had bought from his Mercado Libre account a monitor and two projectors for video games, paid for with credit cards from two officials under him. Trinkets worth twice his state salary. The news unleashed another wave of disbelief among the ruling party’s own ranks. Various sources from Karina Milei’s circle maintain that for her, it was the signal that they could wait no longer. As if it were the last life for the minister who secretly bought the house in the Indio Cua country club, spent $245,000 to renovate it, added an apartment with an interest-free mortgage from two retirees, traveled on private planes paid for by a friend to whom he gave contracts on public TV. On Friday afternoon, the monitor gave Adorni two words: Game over.
The outcome of the process was in Milei’s hands, who was coming on a Madrid-Buenos Aires flight.
In Adorni’s favor, not even the scandalous revelation of bundles of dollars bagged in Martín Insaurralde’s dressing room worked. It might have affected the modesty of the Kirchnerists pointing fingers at the neighbor from Indio Cua, but at the same time it brought echoes of Discépolo. Libertarians were supposed to come to end the privileges of the caste, not to revel in living «in the same mud, all pawed.»
para mí Milei se sacó a Adorni como quien se saca un piojo, pero la verdad es que ya le pesaba su propia mugre. este ajuste de último momento es un chiste berreta para salvar su reelección mientras el pueblo sigue pagando el pato. vendehumo con patas, eso es el trucho este, yo creo que es un parasito del sistema.
Para mí esto es lo mejor que podía hacer Milei. Adorni era un lastre tibio que no servía para nada. Los zurdos lloran como siempre pero acá se viene la re-reelección. Viva la libertad carajo.