Governor Maximiliano Pullaro formally expressed concern regarding remarks made by US President Donald Trump on Wednesday. During a meeting held yesterday with Argentine President Javier Milei, President Trump indicated that continued economic assistance to Argentina would be contingent upon the results of the forthcoming elections scheduled for 26 October.
"It worried me, and it undoubtedly worried the markets as well," the Santa Fe governor told the press, adding: "Relations between states are between states; stable public policies must be developed, and it is not about the affinity one may have with one president or another." He added that "making aid conditional on the outcome of an election puts us in a rather worrying position as a country, and I hope that we will not have to go to the International Monetary Fund or the United States every three or four months, depending on the failure of economic plans, to ask for different bailouts".
Pullaro then argued that "our concern as Santa Fe residents, and because of what the province of Santa Fe represents on the national stage, is how we can maintain fiscal balance, but fundamentally how, through fiscal balance, we can invest," and he affirmed that "no country is developed or can aspire to develop if its roads are in the state they are in Argentina, its energy infrastructure is as we have it, and, of course, its ports and airports." In this regard, he argued that "any country that aspires to grow and develop does so by selling more to the world. From that standpoint, the investment or surplus that arises through fiscal balance cannot always go to supporting the dollar or financial gambling, as we have seen recently, but must go to infrastructure development".
Finally, the governor stated that "when we understand that Argentina has to generate jobs and economic growth and that this is the cornerstone of good government, Argentina will move forward, and to do that, it has to look to this productive interior, it has to look to the province of Santa Fe, to the province of Córdoba, which are provinces with fiscal balance, but which invest a great deal of resources in infrastructure." He added that "if you walk around the province, you will see investments in productive infrastructure, in roads, in energy and in connectivity that allow us to grow, sell more and generate jobs".
