Buenos Aires, Feb. 26 (NA) — The explicit request from the head of the La Libertad Avanza senators' bloc, Patricia Bullrich, to shorten debate times in the chamber was not enough, and ultimately, Uruguay beat Argentina in the race to become the first Mercosur country to legislatively approve the trade agreement with the European Union. While the main goal of ratifying the bilateral agreement will be met, there will be a slight discomfort over the failure to accelerate the vote as intended by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Casa Rosada. The government of Javier Milei sought to be the first to give the green light to the treaty because it intuited that, by becoming the first trading partner to vote for the agreement, Argentina could access differential advantages and benefits (such as higher export quotas) compared to other regional countries competing for the same goods markets. It was Senator Maximiliano Abad of the UCR for the province of Buenos Aires who, as the debate neared its midpoint and seeing that the Uruguayan Parliament was advancing at full speed, proposed to move up the vote so that Argentina would be the first country in the Mercosur bloc to ratify the treaty with the European Union. First, the head of the peronist interblock, José Mayans, and then Senator Anabel Fernández Sagasti, quickly rejected the proposal and pointed out that each senator on the speakers list had the right to justify their vote. Once the news broke that the Uruguayan Parliament had approved the trade agreement with the European Union, senators who were about to drop out of the speaking round signed up again, which prolonged the debate for several more hours than the government would have liked.
