"Like a baboon": The flight of allies and the record of defeats leave the ruling party on the brink of more storms.

"I have an ass like a baboon," Diego Santilli joked among his colleagues in the PRO bloc. Several laughed . The legislator sought to lighten the mood in the bloc with his explicit reference to Javier Milei's frequent comments.

It was already early Thursday morning, and the ruling party—Santilli is a staunch ally of the Libertarians— was racking up consecutive defeats in the House of Representatives . The day ended with an unprecedented result: the government lost 12 consecutive votes. A resounding 12-0.

In the opposition, but also in blocs allied with the libertarians, they blame such a large number of failures on the erroneous parliamentary strategy of Martín Menem , president of the lower house and Karina Milei 's henchman.

According to these sources, there shouldn't have been a session . Menem has the tools to ensure, for example, that some of his allied deputies, loose legislators, and those who are expiring governors don't provide a quorum.

Detail: The opposition gathered more than enough deputies to even achieve a quorum. At 12:20 p.m. on Wednesday, with 10 minutes remaining until the deadline for the session to begin, the scoreboard already showed 135 deputies in the seats, 6 more than the quorum . And more legislators continued to arrive.

Menem attempted to shut down the session. An allied legislator told Clarín that the libertarian asked him not to join the opposition's move, but that he responded that he couldn't oppose university funding and the Garrahan Hospital. There were other instances.

But 10 more issues were added to those two sensitive topics at the urging of the opposition. Some of them are very sensitive for the Casa Rosada, such as the rejection of five presidential decrees and the reopening of the investigative commission into the $LIBRA cryptocurrency scandal, which implicates Milei .

It's still too early to know what this will entail, but reopening it is already a cause for concern for the ruling party. "No one knows what it could lead to," they summarize. The Libertarians played to have that commission ironed out.

The Libra committee's situation also demonstrates the weariness of long-standing allies of the ruling party, who now feel mistreated. The ruling party bet on the session being left without a quorum when the motion to adjourn the committee was voted on.

Although they abstained, the Cordoba Radicals Rodrigo de Loredo, Soledad Carrizo, and Gabriela Brouwer de Koning were in their seats. De Loredo, whose term is expiring and until now a key ally of the ruling party, still doesn't know if LLA will give her a place on the ballot.

To make matters worse, it's said that libertarian Gabriel Bornoroni will be at the top of that list. Note: his term doesn't expire until 2027. A similar move could occur in Santa Fe: the libertarians would put Romina Diez at the top of the national deputy ticket, also with a term until 2027.

Deputies who answer to governors with volatile relationships with the executive branch, such as Martín Llaryora of Córdoba and Claudio Vidal of Santa Cruz, also maintained the quorum and voted with the opposition.

But the three deputies of the Tucumán Peronist Osvaldo Jaldo , a natural ally of the Government until now, voted in favor of the university financing law and the Garrahan law.

"You help them, and they treat you like crazy," explained a congressman who used to support LLA and voted with the opposition in this last session. In Encuentro Federal, Miguel Pichetto 's bloc, they started out as allies of the government and, whenever possible, they called them "rats." Pichetto now voted with the rest of the opposition.

There's an added ingredient to the discontent. "There's a lot of anger toward Menem, also regarding the issue of airfare and legislative staff salaries. They're paid little, and every time you walk into your office, they harass you," summarizes one congressman.

Added to all this is the start of the election campaign, which will provoke further back-and-forth. The opposition is in a mood of "this is just the beginning." They will now immediately seek to advance the fuel tax sharing law and the distribution of National Treasury Contributions (ATN), two laws opposed by the Casa Rosada.

The opposition will seek to address these initiatives after the closing of the lists next Sunday, August 17. They speculate that there will be more casualties among the allies . They will pick them up with an ambulance , hoping to count on their votes.

Beyond this last session, the strategy of the third seems to have worn thin. Instead of seeking to build a majority, the government felt comfortable having a third of the House of Representatives, along with allies, to prevent the opposition from creating special majorities to overrule presidential vetoes. That third began to leak.