The Chief of Staff, the 1994 reform and the Argentine reality

President Alberto Fernández and the new chief of staff, Agustín Rossi

Within the framework of the separation of powers adopted by Argentina with the sanction of the National Constitution of 1853, a strong executive power inspired primarily by the United States Constitution of 1787.

Based on this context, the presidential regime In Argentina, at its origins, it provided for the following headquarters headed by the head of the executive power: a) head of state, b) head of government, c) commander in chief of the armed forces, d) head of the Administration of the country and e) Direct Head of the Federal Capital.

The way in which the various democratically elected presidents have exercised these powers, together with the fact that the executive power is unipersonal, has led various authors over the years to consider that the presidential system had changed into a hyper-presidential system in terms of Carlos Santiago Nino who indicated that the foregoing resulted in an advance of the President on the powers of the legislative branch and an extensive interpretation of the constitutional clauses, thus distorting the model established in the constitutional text.

It was against this image of the situation that, with the return of democracy in 1983, they began to analyze different proposals to overcome this hyper-presidentialism the maximum exposure being the work carried out by the Council for the Consolidation of Democracy, chaired by Nino, whose constitutional reform project provided for the incorporation of various mechanisms to achieve said objective.

Able to concentrating certain functions of an administrative nature being the link between the executive power and the legislative power, also having a fundamental role in the issuance of the DNU and the delegated decrees provided for in article 76 of the National Constitution and, finally, it was considered a “fuse» for change in situations of political crisis, so that through negotiations between the party in power and the opposition, situations of paralysis and blockage of governability can be avoided. We are talking about Chief of Cabinet of Ministers.

However, experience shows that the objectives pursued have clearly not been achievedthus demonstrating the uselessness of its incorporation.

We support the above by taking two situations as examples: the 2001 crisis, an opportunity that would have been the ideal opportunity to put into practice what the voter was looking for, showed that the opposition political parties were not willing to be involved in the mistakes of the ruling party, and the changes that are currently taking place in the aforementioned position.

In other words, far from realizing what was thought in 1994, reality has shown that the Chief of Staff ended up being another official often acting as President’s Spokesperson without fulfilling the role assigned to them, which is aggravated by the fact that the mechanisms provided for their dismissal (impeachment and motion of censure) have never been implemented, in order to be able to analyze their responsibility in the face of repeated breaches of their constitutional obligations, such as attending the chambers of the National Congress on a monthly basis to present a report on the progress of the country.

Repeating a reflection in the light of the events of these days, the changes of chief of staff must lead to reflection on the role that this civil servant must play in the institutional scaffolding or, failing that, the mistakes of the past will be repeated showing once again that the path chosen during the constitutional reform of the 1990s was not the right one.

In short, almost 30 years after its insertion in the Argentine constitutional system, the figure of the chief of staff has not succeeded in mitigating this hyper-presidentialism of which we spoke previously, thus demonstrating that the incorporation of foreign personalities in our institutional history is wrong, something that should be considered for any reform sought at some point.