MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentina: Pichetto to make presidential bid in 2023

Pichetto proposed a tax and labor reform that benefits the poor and favors formal employment over government handouts.

Argentina's comptroller and former Vice-Presidential candidate Miguel Ángel Pichetto Wednesday launched his 2023 bid for Casa Rosada on behalf of “Encuentro Republicano Federal,” the Peronist leg to enter the primaries within the Together for Chance (Juntos por el Cambio - JxC) opposition alliance.

“We are launching a new political party in Argentina that seeks unity and not a rift, a force of the democratic, republican center-right, that comes to put order and administration of the country,” explained the former senator and running mate of Mauricio Macri in 2019.

“If tomorrow there are elections, we will run with our candidates all over the country. We are not a piece of paper in the wind and we are not here for a personal matter and we already have organization and recognition of the national judiciary,” Pichetto further explained.

“We come to say that we are part of the Juntos por el Cambio table as Encuentro Republicano Federal. We have ideas, we have a vision of the country we are going to build, which has nothing to do with the country of pobrismo, which is not something derogatory with the poor, but it is an ideology that destroys us and sends us to decadence,” he went on.

Pichetto proposed a tax and labor reform that benefits the poor and favors formal employment over government handouts.

“We must modernize labor laws and not use old concepts that only harm workers. In Argentina there are only six million formal workers and more than fourteen million among those who receive plans, informal, self-employed who are outside the labor system,” he explained.

“It is enough to look back, it is enough with history, and I also say it to the comrades of Juntos por el Cambio: We are all right and human, all of us. There has been justice. There was reparation, but there was no justice for the other side. The montoneros are going around with the Mapuches, occupying lands in the south,” said Pichetto about the guerrilla movement of the 1970s siding in Patagonia with violent indigenous communities.

Pichetto also called for the Argentine Navy to have a larger budget and resources to defend the country's economic sovereignty at sea. “We will revalue the Armed Forces; it cannot be that a lieutenant in the Army earns as much as a planero [someone living on government unemployment allowance plans],” he argued.

In recent statements, Pichetto had said he wanted Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Macri to clash at the 2023 elections because politics were for first starters and not for substitutes.