Former Argentine president Mauricio Macri gave another nod to Javier Milei, the La Libertad Avanza (LLA) presidential candidate, saying that if he were to win the upcoming elections, he hopes that the opposing coalition Juntos por el Cambio (JxC) he leads would support him. 

JxC presidential candidate Patricia Bullrich described his comments as “inconvenient” and that “now is not the time to discuss that.”

Macri appeared at an event at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School on Tuesday, where he spoke about his time as president and the upcoming Argentine elections. He avoided answering if he would join a potential LLA administration — Milei has publicly mused about offering him a role — but said that if the libertarian economist won, he hoped JxC would back his more “reasonable” proposals.

“We are going to win, but if [Milei] were to [become president], I would expect our coalition to support any reasonable proposal they present in order to leave behind the tricky system in which Argentina has been trapped for so many decades,” Macri said, adding that he also expected LLA Congress members to back proposals from JxC if Bullrich were to become president. 

Patricia Bullrich criticized Macri’s statements in an interview with Urbana radio station on Wednesday, saying she would discuss them with him. 

“We are in the middle of an electoral fight […] fighting for numbers in Congress. Macri saying things like that right now is inconvenient. That is something we have to our advantage, and now is not the time to discuss these things,” she said, referencing that JxC prioritizes outnumbering LLA in Congress as one of its decisive advantages over the new coalition. 

This is not Bullrich’s first criticism of Macri for his statements about Milei. In a television interview in September, she said JxC could no longer be held “hostage” by the former president. 

“In JxC, we have always been hostages of Macri’s actions, and I don’t think we have to be hostages any longer,” Bullrich said in a television interview on TN. “Macri does what he considers best. We must liberate JxC and let Mauricio sort things out however he sees fit.”

Macri’s words at Harvard did not go unnoticed by LLA members either. Buenos Aires City mayoral candidate Ramio Marra “welcomed” Macri with some irony to the libertarian coalition. 

“Mauricio, everybody knows you’re going to vote for Javier Milei. And while others want to kick you out, we welcome you to La Libertad Avanza,” Marra wrote on the website X.