The Milei Government faces a cascade of lawsuits over its economic decree

Almost a week after signing the decree of necessity and urgency (DNU) with which the new Government of Argentina intends to undertake the practical economic deregulation of the country, the president Javier Milei and his cabinet face a cascade of lawsuits against the measure.

The first to be known was presented the day after Milei announced on a national radio and television network the battery of more than 300 reforms to laws and regulations contained in the decree, which will have to be approved in the National Congress, where the The ruling extreme right lacks sufficient parliamentary support.

Several social and union organizations raised the nullity of decree 70/2023 considering that the emergency alleged by the Executive when taking these severe economic measures does not exist.

Since then, the trickle of lawsuits and requests for unconstitutionality of Milei’s decree has been increasing.

Some of the complainants, such as constitutional lawyer Andrés Gil Domínguez, assure that the president is trying “substitute the legislative function of Congress and violate the division of powers.”

Other complainants have spoken out in the same sense, accusing the Government of “trying to advance with a strategy of demolition of Argentine society” and have requested that the effects of the DNU be suspended because it is “unconstitutional and undemocratic.”

For his part, the Minister of Justice, Mariano Cúneo Libarona, considered that the economic deregulation decree is “completely legitimate.”

“That there could be objections from the usual destructive people or from sectors that somehow consider that their privilege is over? I do not have doubts”, Cúneo acknowledged in an interview with the Clarín newspaper.

The minister assured that Justice will be the one who will have to “analyze impartially the DNU and reiterated that he “He is not afraid of illegality.”

For now, the appeals filed against the decree will begin to be processed in the Administrative Litigation Court, although the decree could face lawsuits in other courts in the country.

On everyone’s lips is the role of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, Argentina’s highest court, which could eventually rule against the decree.

Until now, the Supreme Court has ruled on two occasions about the decrees of necessity and urgency, referring in particular to the need for them to be validated by the National Congress and for the Government to use them on a regular basis. “exceptional”.

Meanwhile, the Executive continues to look for allies in the Chamber of Deputies (which together with the Senate makes up the National Congress) to manage the controversial DNU politically, mainly among the deputies of the center-right coalition Together for Change, whose former presidential candidate , Patricia Bulrich, is now the Minister of Security of the Milei Government.

In the streets, several social organizations such as the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) – the majority among Argentine workers and with a Peronist orientation – have already called various mobilizations this week against Milei’s decree, which was received last Wednesday with resounding “cacerolazos” in the streets of Buenos Aires and other cities in the country.

Sanctioned last Wednesday by the ultra-liberal president, it is still not clear when this total reform of the battered Argentine economy will come into effect, which proposes – among many other measures – the privatization of more than sixty public companies, the repeal of laws such as rents or authorize the conversion of football clubs into sports corporations.