Argentina’s Socialists Plan to Strip President of Emergency Executive Order Power – After Using It for 18 Years Themselves

Left-wing members of Argentina’s Chamber of Deputies are discussing measures to amend the law that allows the President to issue special executive orders, Necessity and Urgency Decrees (DNU), which are equated to congressional statutes in the country’s legal system. Left parties accuse President Javier Milei of abusing this form of executive action, although he is neither the first president to use it nor even the most prolific DNU-maker.

The institution of DNU took its current form in 2006 under President Néstor Kirchner. It takes both chambers of the National Congress to repeal a DNU. Since 2006, the parliament has only once been able to reject such a decree (it was President Milei’s recent decree to allocate additional funding to intelligence). One of Milei’s deregulating decrees, which has made it possible for employers to freely raise wages and made housing in Buenos Aires more affordable, was also attacked by the Senate but upheld in the lower chamber.

The opposition to Milei wants to revert the mechanisms so that DNUs would have to be ratified by the National Congress in several months or turn invalid.

In ten months of office, President Milei signed 43 DNUs, compared to 51 decrees by Néstor Kirchner in his first ten months.

For the libertarian president, who last year received a public mandate for a new course, DNUs are virtually the only means to free Argentina from restrictive regulations. The current opposition, which has left the country in an economic crisis, holds the upper hand in parliament and boycotts anything that does not fit their agenda. All the talk of separating government branches is only being raised now because the swamp of the Argentinian establishment has been stirred at the people’s behest.

Few speak of this candidly, but the left has led Argentina into not only an economic but also a political crisis. Institutions have degenerated into a state of total dysfunction, whence the demand for change came. As a reformer, Milei has to dismantle the established system of mutual clientelism and get through the resistance of the parliament, which still holds the bulk of political power. Otherwise nothing will be accomplished.