In the midst of the general confusion generated by the support of Mauricio Macri and Patricia Bullrich for Javier Milei for the November 19 runoff, the former president and head of the Together for Change hawks also put Boca on the electoral agenda. He went almost unnoticed among the cataract of ruptures, criticisms and adhesions to that agreement, but it is an issue that Macri always has among his first considerations. “I am evaluating whether I will be in the elections as Andrés Ibarra’s running mate. “I am actively working on it,” he admitted on Radio Miter this Friday.
In the xeneize circle, which largely coincides with the national red circle, that phrase reactivated a campaign that had been slowed down by the ups and downs of the presidential elections and also by the arrival of Boca to the final of the Copa Libertadores, a sports board that It cushioned the logical tension of any electoral dispute.
Some time ago, Macri decided to have a predominant presence in the formation that will lead his former Minister of Modernization Andrés Ibarra as a candidate for president. He knows that the mission is not easy: in front of him is Juan Román Riquelme, idol and vice president, who has an advantage to achieve re-election, and who is also evaluating different options for the December elections.
Strategies. At the operative table of the bostero macrismo, in addition to Ibarra and Macri, Javier Medín, former member of the AFA Normalization Committee that FIFA appointed after the scandalous 38-38 and who has known Macri and Ibarra since the days of the Group, has a relevant participation. Socma. Medin acts as the campaign manager of a group that includes the first vice president of the Judicial Council of the City of Buenos Aires, Francisco Quintana; the businessman and connoisseur of the map of clubs in the provinces Royco Ferrari; the banker Rómulo Zemborain; the economist Daniel Artana; to the paper businesswoman Natalia Pompilio, daughter of the deceased former president Horacio Paolini, and to Edgardo Alifraco.
Artana’s data is not minor in this electoral context. He is one of the economists that Milei endorsed – along with Rodolfo Santángelo – to join an eventual government in the event that it triumphs in the second electoral round, as part of the negotiations that he held in recent days. But Artana is not the only vertex where the Boca, Macri and Milei campaign come together. The other is Alifraco, one of the leaders of the Superboca group, part of the MID in the City of Buenos Aires and recently elected as a Buenos Aires legislator by La Libertad Avanza. “On the night of the meeting, Milei told me: ‘I need you to restore the joy of being a Boca fan that I had lost since Riquelme became president,’” Macri declared. It was more of an election slogan than a real conversation.
Just as the Bostero Macrismo designs a strategy with Macri at the campaign table, the ruling party also has an electoral scheme outlined with some variants. According to what the group that accompanies Riquelme has already communicated, the idol and current vice president has two different tickets for December. The result that Boca obtains at the Maracaná against Fluminense will determine who heads the list. In Román’s mind there is a medium-term plan to find an alternation that guarantees more than two terms, as stipulated in the club’s statute.
Losing the Libertadores final will not only be a sporting setback: it will also be a political setback. Winning it and having its fans offer postcards of celebration and happiness at the Obelisk and throughout the country will provide the ruling party with certain political and electoral guarantees. “If we win, game over,” they say on the Ezeiza grounds, the place in the world that Román found to lead the club. “Boca’s arrival in the final didn’t change anything for us, but for them it did. What is being discussed here is a management model that goes far beyond eventual sporting success,” they say in the opposition.
The elections still do not have a date. The statute determines that they must be carried out in the first half of December. The current board of directors wants them to be on Saturday the 2nd, something that is rejected by the opposition and by part of the Jewish community, with around ten thousand people among the xeneize corporate mass. In the next few days, the date will be set. As happens with the candidacies, it will be after the Libertadores final. A match that marks something much more complex and profound than a sporting result.
