Buenos Aires City Mayor Jorge Macri has brought two PRO national deputies into his inner circle ahead of the October mid-term elections. María Eugenia Vidal will serve as Macri’s campaign manager, while Diego Santilli will be granted a senior position, although details on his role have not been made public.

While PRO and President Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza (LLA) are considering an alliance in other districts, the national ruling party is campaigning aggressively in Buenos Aires City. Pilar Ramirez, head of LLA in the capital, makes regular media appearances lambasting Macri’s administration. Milei’s far-right party and PRO, or Propuesta Republicana as it as formally known, compete for a similar electorate.

Vidal was governor of Buenos Aires Province between 2015 and 2019 and one of the party’s rising stars. However, her career was upset after losing her reelection bid against Peronist candidate Axel Kicillof, who is now serving his second term in the province. Vidal was previously Mauricio Macri’s vice mayor in Buenos Aires City between 2011 and 2015.

In 2018, Vidal was embroiled in a campaign financing scandal in which impoverished welfare recipients were found to have been fraudulently registered as PRO donors in the province. A criminal investigation was opened and last December, four members of the campaign were indicted.

Santilli started his career in Buenos Aires City’s Peronist party before switching to the PRO. He was Horacio Rodríguez Larreta’s vice mayor between 2015 and 2021, before leaving to run for a seat as a national deputy.

Meanwhile, the Buenos Aires City government has made changes that echo positions expressed by Milei recently. This week, the administration downgraded the Women’s Subsecretariat to a directorate, cut its budget, and fired its head, Carolina Barone. Macri’s administration had upgraded the directorate to a subsecretariat less than a year earlier.

The decision came two weeks after President Javier Milei attacked “gender ideology” at the World Economic Forum in Davos and argued that femicide should not exist as a specific crime.

The city’s Vice Mayor Clara Muzzio wrote “There are only two genders: male and female” in a social media post. PRO and LLA members responded with harsh criticism, since the statement appeared to reflect a change from her previous position. “I would like to believe that the real Clara is the one who marched with us with the pride t-shirt,” Maximiliano Ferraro, head of the centrist Coalición Cívica party, wrote on X.