The different opposition parties to the far right twisted the arm of Javier Milei’s Government in Congress. This Wednesday, they forced a session of the Chamber of Deputies and managed to compel the ruling party to start addressing two problems that the Executive denies or downplays: the growing delinquency of Argentine families with banks and virtual wallets, as well as the emergency in care for people with disabilities, one of the State areas most affected by the presidential cuts.
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Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, and its allies bet on preventing the special session of Deputies. But Peronism, the centrist forces, and the left gathered 135 deputies, out of a total of 257, and achieved quorum to hold the session. Once that struggle was resolved, the ultra ruling party joined the debate.
“The emergency in disability has worsened,” warned at the beginning of the debate Deputy Juan Marino, from the Peronist bloc Unión por la Patria. Last year, to face the cuts in the area applied by Milei, Congress approved a law that established the emergency in disability until December 2026. The president vetoed the law, but Parliament ratified it. Even so, families of people with disabilities and service providers report multiple breaches by the Executive. “The Government has practically stopped new registrations for disability pensions for social protection and that is the first breach of the law. According to official data, since January 2024, 90,791 procedures to grant pension registration have been initiated and only 10,374 have been resolved,” Marino detailed.
The opposition first tried to extend the emergency for one more year, addressing the issue on the floor. To do so, it needed two-thirds of the votes and did not get them: deputies from LLA, PRO — the party of former president Mauricio Macri — and allies of the divided Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) voted against. Then, the opposition blocs sought to compel the Chamber’s committees to start addressing, from next week, the proposal to extend the emergency and reach a report before the end of the month. No longer needing a qualified majority, they had enough support and even the far-right legislators ended up voting in favor, to avoid being clearly in the minority. It was approved with 249 votes.
The same path was followed in the debate on the increase in delinquency in personal debts, one of the problems that has generated the greatest social concern in recent months. There are more than 20 million Argentines indebted with banks, virtual wallets, credit cards, and other entities. More than a quarter of the debtors (26.1%) are in default and the amount of debts in irregular status reaches 17.5% of the total lent, a sharp increase compared to 4.2% recorded at the end of 2023, when Milei took office.
So far, the president has maintained that it is a problem between private parties and that the State should not intervene. The opposition has presented dozens of projects to address the situation in Congress, from different perspectives, without the ruling party admitting the opening of the debate. In this Wednesday’s session, the opposition benches in the Chamber of Deputies also failed to start the discussion on the floor, but they did compel the committees to begin analyzing the proposals next week, to agree on a report. The vote, in this case, was resolved with 249 deputies in favor and only one against.
“Argentines go into debt because their incomes are not enough to meet the needs of daily life,” warned Deputy Germán Martínez, president of the Peronist bloc. Pablo Juliano, from the opposition UCR, celebrated that Congress was “up to the level of a transcendental issue that worries and keeps many Argentines awake.”
Left-wing legislators denounced “the brutal hypocrisy” of the Government, which supported the proposals on delinquency and disability after having blocked their treatment for months. “Indebtedness is a direct result of this Government’s policy,” said Deputy Romina del Plá. “They have left salaries and pensions on the floor, deregulated public service rates, prices of medicines and transportation. All that leads families to go into debt.”
La Libertad Avanza will now have to enable in Congress two discussions it preferred to avoid. At the end of the session, having suffered defeat, the ruling party legislators were content to celebrate that the projects on family delinquency will not go through the budget committee, so they should not imply an expenditure for public coffers, Milei’s great obsession.
