Alberto Fernández, weighed down by Mauricio Macri’s decision, arrives in New York

NEW YORK.- Even with the fresh impact of the news of the passage to the side of Mauricio Macri in the fight for Pink HousePresident Alberto Fernandez arrived in the United States this Sunday to see businessmen, executives and analysts of Wall Street in New York before traveling to Washington to meet US President Joe Biden at the White House, the first bilateral meeting between the two leaders.

Fernández and his entourage landed in the afternoon at the international airport JFK -The ambassador, Jorge Argüello, received them- and then they moved to the Park Hyattlocated on 57th Street, on the west side of Manhattan, the same hotel chosen for his last visit to New York, the previous year, for the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The scale in New York functioned as a bridge – assembled against the clock in recent days – between the summit of leaders that took place in Santo Domingo and the official visit to Washington, which Pink House he had been waiting since July of the previous year.

Macri’s decision overshadowed his arrival in the United States. Without your confirmed candidacy, Alberto Fernandez will be almost 48 hours in New York, where his main activity will be a dinner, on Monday, at the Council of the Americas. Some guests received the announcement of the meeting last Friday morning, as he may have learned THE NATION. There were executives and analysts with already closed work agendas who declined the invitation. The interest in Fernández is marked by reality: all eyes are on October, and who will compete to try to get the economy back on track.

As has happened in other trips abroad, Argentine politics ended up sneaking into the foreign agenda of the Casa Rosada. First it was the speech of maximum kirchner in which he opened the game to define the candidacies in the primaries, a turn that albertismo celebrated with caution from the Caribbean. Just as that news was beginning to fade, Macri announced his decision to drop out of the race for the Presidency, a momentous decision on the road to the October elections that turned the political tableau upside down. Kirchnerism has already slipped that it expects President Alberto Fernández imitate the decision.

But in the presidential circle – already openly confronted with Kirchnerism – they implied that the President is not lowering his candidacy, and argued that Macri’s decision has no impact on the internal one of the Frente de Todos. The candidacies will eventually be decided in the presidential primaries, which become even more relevant.

The visit to the White House will give you a valuable photo that the Government sought Non stop. The invitation came in the middle of the previous year, but the meeting was called off when Biden contracted Covid-19. At that time, shortly before the inauguration of Sergio Massa as Minister of the Economy, in Albertism there were those who believed that the photo in the Oval Room – which Cristina Kirchner never got – could give her a boost. President Fernández now arrives in the United States much weaker and with his political future much more complicated: The economy has deteriorated, inflation has already exceeded 100% per year, and his gravitation in the Frente de Todos falters due to the constant pressure from Kirchnerism to make him desist from being a candidate again.

None of this seems to influence his intention to seek a new mandate for the moment. In Albertismo they still believe that the President is the best positioned candidate of the Frente de Todos, despite the strong internal rejection generated by his eventual candidacy.

Alberto Fernández and his entourage chose to avoid any public statement about Macri’s decision. The only official reaction to Macri’s decision was provided by the presidential spokesperson, Gabriela Cerruti, who, before the Aerolíneas Argentinas plane in which the delegation was traveling, took off from Santo Domingo, went out to respond to the criticism in Macri’s message, without refer to the decision of the former president. Cerruti retweeted Macri’s video along with photos of Alberto Fernández with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Emmanuel Macron, the leaders of the G20 and Celac. “Isolated from the world”, was the ironic message that Cerruti chose.

Macri had said in his message, with which he paved the way for the candidates of Together for Change and ran out of the presidential race, that Argentines are “drift, without leadership, isolated from the world, alone”, a situation that causes “anguish in the middle of the chest,” he remarked. Besides, Macri He sent a strong message clearly directed at Fernández: “We will never have a puppet as president again.”

In addition to the photographs, Cerruti also released the White House statement on the bilateral meeting between Biden and Alberto Fernández. “Good Sunday!” Closed the spokeswoman.