The freedom to not be listened to: Argentina’s Milei limits citizen participation in decision-making

The freedom that Javier Milei proclaims does not include citizen participation in the decision-making process. At least that is what two recent initiatives from his government suggest. Last week, the far-right president eliminated by decree the public scrutiny phase of the process for selecting candidates to the Supreme Court. At the same time, his administration is pushing regulation of interactions between officials and private actors with a bill that restricts a citizen’s right to petition authorities, by equating it with corporate lobbying. A broad array of civil society organizations warns that eliminating or reducing the spaces for public participation weakens democracy.

“The government does not get along well with institutional and civil society oversight. Nor does it get along with press scrutiny,” says Pablo Secchi, director of Poder Ciudadano, one of the organizations sounding the alarm about the risky advances of Milei’s administration. “I think this government has many problems with the institutional mechanisms that allow for a strong democracy.”

The alarm was raised earlier this month when the executive branch submitted a bill to Congress titled “Transparency and Public Disclosure of Interest Management”. According to the government, its purpose is to guarantee “the traceability and probity of interactions between public and private actors in the processes of forming and making state decisions,” from issuing or amending laws to contracts, licenses or the handling of public funds, among other measures.

The proposal would create a public registry of “interest managers,” into which both citizens and entities of any kind that make approaches to members of the executive and legislative branches would be required to enroll. They would have to provide not only personal or legal data, but also detail whether they are acting pro bono or not, and whether they represent domestic or foreign interests. They would also have to submit a detailed quarterly report on their activities. Separately, officials and legislators would register their contacts with private-sector actors. The bill provides for fines, prison sentences and disqualifications for those who falsify information or fail to submit the required reports.

Although the far-right administration has presented the proposal as a contribution to building “a more deliberative, transparent and liberal democracy,” nearly 200 associations, foundations, forums and human rights organizations say the bill “threatens the work of civil society,” “restricts participation and autonomy” of their organizations, “centralizes control in an authority that is not independent, and criminalizes formal errors.” In a joint statement they conclude that it “does not strengthen democracy” but rather “erodes it precisely where it matters most.”

The main criticism from NGOs is that the government draws an equivalency between “the relationships among the state, the private sector and civil society.” They argue that “contact between a company and an official seeking a regulatory or direct economic benefit is not comparable to the work of an organization that promotes rights, represents collective interests, voices social demands or carries out democratic oversight of power. Treating them the same under a single regime of registration, control and sanctions is not neutral: it has serious political consequences.”

“We support regulating lobbying as an activity that seeks to contact officials to pursue an economic benefit, but the way it is currently drafted, the bill is so broad it covers actions of a very different nature,” explains Eduardo Ferreyra, co-director of the Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia (ACIJ). “If, for example, relatives of victims of an incident were to present their complaints to the authorities, they would be covered by this bill,” he warns.

Another swipe to citizen participation was inflicted by Milei through a decree signed last Tuesday. The president revised the rules governing the appointment of Supreme Court justices, the attorney general and the national public defender. Since 2003, the executive branch had been required to organize a citizen evaluation stage for potential nominees to those posts before sending candidates to the Senate. During that stage, citizens, civil organizations, professional associations, academic institutions and other entities could submit “positions, observations and circumstances they consider relevant” about the prospective candidates. Milei eliminated that stage, claiming that public scrutiny is already guaranteed when the matter is debated in Congress. Incidentally, the same decree also removed the recommendation to respect gender parity when composing the highest court.

A dozen non-governmental organizations voiced their rejection of the presidential decree. “Citizen participation strengthens the quality of decisions and accountability, while diversity lends greater legitimacy to our justice system,” said CELS, Amnesty International, ACIJ, Poder Ciudadano, Inecip and other NGOs. “Restricting spaces for citizen intervention and abandoning criteria aimed at promoting plural integration of the highest court” are measures that increase distrust in public institutions, “weakening democracy.” They add that “the appointment of judicial authorities is one of the most consequential decisions and, as such, requires more oversight, not less.”

The absence, scarcity or weakening of channels and mechanisms for public participation are among the factors political science has long warned about, across various countries, as contributing to democratic erosion. With case-by-case nuances, the phenomenon is often associated with leaders who reach power through elections, establish a direct relationship with their voters and “exercise power without any willingness to accept checks, or even actively seek to undermine those checks, against Congress or the judiciary,” explains political scientist Miguel De Luca.

How does that style of governance coexist with a rhetoric like Milei’s, whose main slogan is “long live freedom”? “There are at least three variants of what is understood by liberalism,” De Luca says. The libertarianism that Milei claims to follow elevates individual freedom, private property and non-intervention by the state as supreme values. “Another variant is what Italians call being ‘liberista,’ which means favoring freedom only in the economic sphere. And the third is the more progressive variant, where liberalism refers to a set of rights across all spheres of social life: religious freedom, freedom to participate in public life, sexual freedom... That conception is entirely absent from Milei’s views. He moves between being libertarian and being ‘liberista.’”

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