Buenos Aires, Dec 26 (EFE).- Nearly a week after the new Argentine government signed the Economic Emergency Decree to deregulate the country’s economy, President Javier Milei and his cabinet are facing a cascade of lawsuits challenging the measure.
The first was filed the day after Milei went on national radio and television to announce the battery of more than 300 legal and regulatory reforms.
Social and trade union organizations have raised since then the possible nullity of Decree 70/2023, arguing that the state of emergency invoked by the executive to adopt these harsh economic measures does not exist.
Throughout the week the number of lawsuits and petitions claiming the unconstitutionality of Milei’s decree has increased.
Some of the plaintiffs, such as constitutional lawyer Andrés Gil Domínguez, claim that the president is trying to “replace the legislative function of Congress and violate the separation of powers.”
Other plaintiffs have accused the government of “trying to advance a strategy of demolition of Argentine society” and have requested that the effects of the decree be suspended because it is “unconstitutional and undemocratic.”
However, the decree still needs to be approved by the National Congress, where the far right lacks sufficient parliamentary support.
Despite the pending judicial and legislative process, Justice Minister Mariano Cúneo Libarona called the economic deregulation decree “perfectly legitimate.”
“There may be objections from the usual destructive people, or from sectors that somehow think their privileges are over? I have no doubt,” Cúneo said in an interview with the newspaper Clarín.
The minister assured that the judiciary will be the one to “impartially analyze” the decree and reiterated that he is “not afraid of illegality.”
For the time being, appeals against the decree will be heard by the Administrative Litigation Court, although the decree could be challenged in other courts, and there is great expectation about the Supreme Court’s review, which could ultimately rule against it.
So far, it has on two of the government’s most recent decrees, pointing out that they must be validated by the National Congress and that the government can only use them in “exceptional” cases.
Meanwhile, the executive continues to seek allies in the Senate and National Congress among the deputies of the center-right Together for Change coalition, whose former presidential candidate, Patricia Bulrich, is now Minister of Security.
In the streets, several social organizations, such as the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) – the largest Argentine labor federation with a Peronist orientation – has already called demonstrations for this week against Milei’s decree, which was greeted last week with a cacerolazo protes with people banging pots and pans in the streets of Buenos Aires and other cities.
It is still not clear when this total reform of the battered Argentine economy will come into effect, which proposes, among other measures, the privatization of more than sixty public companies, the abolition of laws such as rent or the authorization of the transformation of soccer clubs into sports companies. EFE
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