With his European tour, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta is committed to strengthening his “presidential” image by 2023

Only last month did he dare to publicly confess that he has presidential aspirations. Although his political movements have long been seen along that path, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta needed to “whitewash” the situation. “There is a long way to talk about candidacies, but it is true that we are consolidating a team, we are consolidating a proposal, we are consolidating an alternative in Together for Change”, he acknowledged ahead of the election year 2023.

Although there is a long way to go and will have to overcome several obstacles in that race within the main opposition coalition to be among the candidates, the trip that began to Europe this weekend falls within this framework. The head of government of the City of Buenos Aires will visit the German cities of Hanover and Berlin until Thursday 24, and will also stop in Madrid. He will meet with officials and businessmen. On its agenda this time there are projects related to education, work and the promotion of tourism.

He will hold meetings with mayors of different ideological orientation. In Berlin, he will meet the brand-new mayor of the German capital, Franziska Giffey, who took office in December last year. It belongs to the Social Democratic Party although the German Parliament elected it as part of a coalition that it had to form with the Green Party and the left-wing party LINKE for the next five years.

Larreta wants to internalize there, as reported by the Buenos Aires government, after the launch of educational practices in the City's secondary schools, in the German “dual model” that combines theoretical training in schools with practical instances in companies. In addition, he will visit the ABB vocational training centre and the Stadler Deutschland GmbH company, to learn about the programme they are developing together with the Chamber of Industry of that city.

In the German capital, the Secretary General and International Relations of the City of Buenos Aires, Fernando Straface, who will accompany the mayor of Buenos Aires, will hold a meeting with Michael Müller, member of the Foreign Relations Committee of the German Parliament and former mayor of Berlin. Straface will also travel to Paris, where he will meet with José Antonio Ardavin, head of Latin America of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and Andreas Schaal, director of Institutional Relations, as Argentina is a potential member of that international cooperation agency.

On March 22 and 23, Rodríguez Larreta will move to Madrid, where several meetings related to international tourism await him. On Tuesday he will have lunch with the president of the Ibero-American Business Foundation, Josep Piqué Camps, and with representatives of other Spanish companies that make up the Foundation.

A day later he will have an interview with the current Madrid mayor José Luis Martínez Almeida of the Popular Party, with whom he already held a video conference in May 2021 during the heaviest stage of Covid in our country. Then he will meet Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid and also a member of the PP, a center-right political force in Spain.

The international agenda that evidenced this presidential profile had its first chapter shortly after the PASO in September 2021, when Larreta met in Washington, United States, with John Kerry, former Secretary of State and Special Envoy of his country's government for Climate. They talked about climate change in the face of the imminent Glasgow Summit at the end of October, about the actions to be implemented and Kerry was invited to visit Buenos Aires this year.

On that occasion, Larreta took the opportunity to meet with former Democratic President Bill Clinton and during his time in the US capital and in New York he also spoke with Felipe Jaramillo, Vice President of the World Bank for Latin America and the Caribbean region, and Mauricio Claver-Clarone, president of the Bank. Inter-American Development (IDB). There was no shortage of conversations with representatives of the most relevant “think thank”.

Rodríguez Larreta has global alliances. This Wednesday, March 16, he had a videoconference with his London partner, Sadiq Khan, in which it was confirmed that between October 19 and 21, the City of Buenos Aires will host the C40 World Summit of Mayors, which takes place every three years and which brings together leaders from nearly a hundred cities where they are discussing measures to fight against climate change.

“We are proud of our leadership in climate action. To promote the integral well-being of people, now is the time to unite the mayors of Latin America and the world to drive faster and more ambitious action towards the COP 27 (United Nations Climate Change Conference),” said Rodríguez Larreta, current vice president of C40 for Latin America, in statements disseminated in a statement.

That mayors meeting could be another launching pad for Larreta. It would not be the first time that the head of government of a capital city has been projected nationally, it has already happened in Argentina and elsewhere in the world. Tabaré Vázquez who made the leap from Montevideo to the top position in Uruguay and Boris Johnson, from mayor of London to prime minister in the United Kingdom, are two palpable examples.

The meeting is held every three years and brings together mayors and leaders of the 96 member cities of the C40 network with managers from global companies, philanthropists, investors, academics and activists. The previous C40 events were organized by London, New York, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, Mexico City and Copenhagen. On this occasion, the Argentine capital competed with Austin and Miami (United States); Madrid and Barcelona (Spain); Medellin (Colombia); Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo (Brazil) and Shenzhen (China).

In October, participants will discuss “how cities can move towards carbon neutrality, how to address the climate emergency and increase green financing for climate change mitigation and adaptation projects, especially for cities in the global South.” As a novelty, the summit will include a business forum on creating green jobs and a “youth summit” with leaders from around the country and around the world.

“The C40 assessment takes into account the city's progress in its commitments to combat climate change. In addition, it considers the conditions it has to host global events, which include everything from previous successful international forums, hotel infrastructure, congresses and conventions, to factors such as the city's cultural offer and diversity,” explained Straface, Larreta's chief advisor on international issues.

The panorama on the home front

If he intends to reach Casa Rosada next year, Rodríguez Larreta must first face a powerful intern in Juntos por el Cambio. The governor of Jujuy, Gerardo Morales, one of the strongmen within a radicalism that regained prominence in the mid-term elections, has already announced that he will compete.

In the hardest line of the PRO in which Patricia Bullrich mainly enrolls, another potential opponent appears. The question remains as to what Mauricio Macri will do, who still gives a little ambiguous signs thinking about 2023.

In the last week, during the round of domestic policy talks, the mayor of Buenos Aires held meetings with Deputy Miguel Angel Pichetto (Federal Peronism), with Florencia Arietto (the criminal lawyer who was part of the Renovation Front and who in 2018 joined the PRO as Bullrich's adviser on security issues) and with Emilio Monzó, the former president of the Chamber of Deputies who is the main reference of the Dialogue Party, one of the legs of the opposition coalition.

“We have been working with Miguel for a long time, we share a lot of campaign activities, we share the vision that a very broad agreement is required for the transformations that Argentina needs. Florencia is joining Diego Santilli's team in the province of Buenos Aires, where we expect to govern again and are preparing,” Rodríguez Larreta admitted.

After the 2021 elections, where he imposed María Eugenia Vidal in the City and her vice-chief Diego Santilli as the top of the list among the Buenos Aires deputies against the opinion of many of his peers, the head of government of Buenos Aires was right and advanced in his profile as a leader, although he received many attacks from the “hawks” sector of the alliance that integrates.

In recent weeks it has shown an active role in pursuit of its goals for the coming year. It was at the forefront of the calls for stronger national government's stance on the conflict in Ukraine, attended the conciliation hearing to resolve the claims for co-participation before the Supreme Court, accompanied the protests in the countryside before the rise in oil and soybean meal detentions, and highlighted the importance of security in the area of the City. Obvious signs that he is determined to go for more.

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