Argentina’s Congress fails to overturn Milei’s university funding veto

Lower house of Congress fails to achieve a two-thirds majority needed to overrule president’s veto despite mass protests.

Argentina’s lower house of Congress has failed to reverse a presidential veto of legislation that would have shored up public university funding – a win for the country’s libertarian leader after mass protests opposing university cuts in recent months.

Wednesday’s vote upheld President Javier Milei’s veto of a bill that would have brought public university funding in line with Argentina’s inflation rate, one of the world’s highest. Argentina faces an economic crisis with annual inflation close to 240 percent and more than half of its population in poverty.

Thousands of people have demonstrated against austerity measures that Milei has introduced since his election win last year.

Milei, a self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist, has pledged to gut public spending and derided the education system, calling the university funding bill “unjustified”. He argued that the law would jeopardise a fiscal balance he has promoted to tackle the long-running economic crisis.

Argentina’s health, pension and education spending have been the hardest hit by the cuts. University salaries have lost about 40 percent of their purchasing power due to inflation.

Voting in favour of the university funding bill were 160 parliamentarians with 84 against and five abstentions. The tally fell six votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to reverse the president’s veto. Milei’s far-right party makes up only a small minority in Congress, but it has formed alliances with conservative lawmakers to prevent the opposition from reaching the two-thirds threshold needed to pass the legislation.

Students have been calling for more investment in public universities, which are free to all. Thousands rallied outside Congress in central Buenos Aires earlier this month, holding up signs with slogans such as: “How can we have freedom without education?”

Psychology graduate Ana Hoqui said she showed up to the protest to defend the education system, which enabled her to pursue a career in medicine.

“I could never have trained without the free public university system,” she told the AFP news agency. “That’s why I came to defend it because I feel it’s in danger.”

The recent protests came months after hundreds of thousands of Argentinians took to the streets in April to voice outrage at cuts to higher public education. Labour unions, opposition parties and private universities backed those protests in Buenos Aires and other major cities with a teachers union reporting a million protesters countrywide.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies