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Go and come. Schedule outside and schedule inside. Leave definitions and sow mysteries. Stand on ideological issues but also allow certain rumors to flow. Mauricio Macri is comfortable in the political moment in which he has to live, in which he does not define anything regarding his personal future, but in his environment they celebrate that he has regained political centrality.
In that coming and going, next week he will embark for Washington, where he will give two classes at the traditional Georgetown University. The international agenda is what he always enjoys the most, something that also happened to him while he was president. He felt that he had more recognition abroad than within the country.
The first two years in the plain passed with the same tessitura. With an agenda limited by the pandemic, he received more invitations from abroad to give talks and conferences than from local leaders to meet and exchange ideas. Some wanted him to retire, others to give him a secondary role and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta himself, when defining his electoral strategy in 2021, did so with the aim of assuming a leadership role in the opposition ranks. Half a year later, that leadership is still under discussion.
In the ranks of the PRO, and also of Together for Change, no one doubts that Macri’s position will be key, by action or omission, for the definitions for 2023. Today he proposes that there be a STEP between Larreta, Patricia Bullrich and everything who wants to compete. In addition, he gives free rein to leaders in his environment so that they give volume to the “government teams” presented by the head of the PRO. The unanswered question is whether he is going to hold his own until the end or end up formally supporting one of the two.
And why not him? He will depend on a carom to multiple bands: in his environment they assure that Juliana Awada asks him not to be a candidate again, but they also recognize that he leaves the door open. If the polls give him guarantees of a victory, there are those who believe that he will not hesitate to run again.
The problem is that even though politically he is in a better situation than when he left power, and polls show that his positive image has improved, his negative image is still very high. He could be successful in a PvC PASS, but then an election campaign for the generals or an eventual ballottage would turn uphill.
That is why the centrality and the mystery today give it more power than a postulation. Meanwhile, he will continue to oscillate, leading a dinner with the main referents, going to activities with one or another, and receiving leaders from all over the country in his offices who today ask for a photo with him. In parallel, he will continue with his international agenda, whether they are photos with leaders such as Donald Trump, activities of the FIFA Foundation (in a World Cup year) or classes at universities.
In Georgetown, he will give two talks: the first on Tuesday, titled “Reflections on Leadership,” and the second on Wednesday, “Lessons from a Presidency.” With a curious tidbit, the moderator will be a former IMF strongman. This is Alejandro Werner, who was director for the Department of the Western Hemisphere when the agreement was signed during the Macri government. He recently took over as director of the Americas Institute at Georgetown University.