POSADAS.- Lawyer Adrián Nuñez, president of La Libertad Avanza-Misiones, announced on Friday that he will be the candidate for governor in the upcoming elections to be held in April or May.
"I want to be governor to change the history of the province after more than 20 years of the same old thing. We have put together a highly capable technical and political team so that Misiones can have the place of relevance it deserves," said Nuñez in a statement. However, hours later, the great figure of LLA-Misiones, national deputy and former professional tennis player Diego Hartfield, came out to say that he also did not rule out being a candidate for governor. Precisely with Hartfield as head of the list, LLA comes off winning the last election for national deputies in October 2026, and now seeks to dethrone the Misiones ruling party, which is now called "Encuentro por lo que se Viene" and which for 20 years operated under the name "Frente Renovador de la Concordia" or simply "Renovación."
Diego Hartfield speaks in the Chamber of Deputies. Soledad Aznarez
Despite the confusion over the statement from LLA-Misiones, of which Nuñez is the undisputed leader, the libertarian organizer himself finally clarified that Karina Milei has not yet decided who she will back, nor has she defined the strategy in Misiones.
"I am the candidate who has the support of the provincial party. The candidacy will be defined when we present the list in accordance with the national strategy led by Karina Milei," Nuñez clarified this Sunday.
At this moment, the top electoral priority of the Casa Rosada is to ensure the suspension of the PASO primaries, as a minimum alternative if total elimination is not possible. And for that, the National Government, with Chief of Staff Diego Santilli at the helm, is negotiating with the governors. Governor Hugo Passalacqua is open to talking and supporting the suspension of the primaries, and an alternative being floated in some political strategy circles is that in exchange for that support, the Casa Rosada will not go after the governors' power in 2027.
The governor of Misiones, Hugo Passalacqua, together with leaders of federal Peronism. @vtolosapaz
Karina Milei was in Posadas on July 4 for the inauguration of the LLA School of Leaders, and avoided criticizing the ruling party (at that time, in the midst of the power struggle between Carlos Rovira and Passalacqua), as well as venturing whether in 2027 they would seek to win the governorship.
Passalacqua will be the candidate for the Frente Renovador de la Concordia or Renovación (now called Movimiento por lo que se Viene), although he has not yet officially announced his candidacy. In recent months, after a historic dispute, he displaced Rovira as the political chief in Misiones.
The third party in this dispute, which today has the province's politics on edge, will be Ramón Amarilla, the former police non-commissioned officer who was imprisoned for 7 months accused of "sedition" after a massive protest by police officers, teachers, health personnel, and state employees in April 2024.
Former police officer Ramón Amarilla, one of the aspirants to the Governorship of Misiones.
Adrián Nuñez is a lawyer specialized in tax law, graduated from the UBA, and has a postgraduate degree in Political Communication from George Washington University. For years he has had ties with Eduardo "Lule" Menem, and through that connection came the rapprochement with Karina Milei, with whom he met several times in Misiones and Buenos Aires. His other reference is Martín Menem. Since the beginning of LLA-Misiones, he was the undisputed leader of the space and ceded to Hartfield the role of being the main figure, especially on social media, until last year. He also blocked the attempt of other important opposition figures, such as Martín Arjol (former gubernatorial candidate), to join the space, despite his support for Javier Milei in Congress, even on his most controversial policies in Misiones, such as the deregulation of yerba mate. Nuñez carefully chose who enters and, above all, who does not enter the local libertarian franchise.
In the last year, when he entered as a provincial deputy and was elected vice president of the Legislature, Nuñez raised his profile and shaped his own figure as the main opposition reference in Misiones, standing alongside Hartfield.
Nuñez, Karina, and Martín Menem, during one of the president's sister's first visits to Misiones.
Some of Nuñez's main issues have been questioning certain appointments in the Judiciary, the tax pressure of the former Revenue Department with its advance withholding system for Gross Receipts, and, fundamentally, the controversial Ley de Lemas (list system law). But perhaps his greatest political victory in the provincial Chamber of Deputies was a 19-to-19 vote in which Nuñez surprised everyone by requesting immediate consideration of a request for reports demanding transparency about eight of the province's main state-owned companies and State-Majority-Owned Corporations (SAPEM), such as Multimedios, Aguas de las Misiones, Marandú, and the Biofábrica, among others. For the first time in more than a decade, the Misiones ruling party found itself in trouble, the opposition united, and it almost twisted the arm of the former Renovación, which for a long time had been running the Legislature like a true notary office for Rovira.
By Martín Boerr