Argentina’s Congress debates on Wednesday whether to overturn President Javier Milei’s veto of a bill to increase pensions, amid heavy security due to a planned mass opposition protest.

Milei, a budget-slashing libertarian, last week blocked an 8.1-percent pensions increase approved by both houses of Congress, which aimed to help cushion retirees in the South American country hit by annual inflation of 250 percent.

The president claimed the measure was “manifestly in violation of the current legal framework as it does not consider the fiscal impact of the measure nor determine the source of its financing.”

Since taking office in December, Milei has applied a drastic austerity program in a bid to rein in chronic inflation and decades of government overspending.

Critics say a steep drop in inflation and other apparent economic wins have come at the cost of the poor and working classes, and due to a strangling of the economy.

Hundreds of police were deployed around Congress ahead of a protest by pensioners, opposition parties, social movements, and the country’s main labor union, in rejection of the veto.

“It’s an excessive security operation, it seems like we’re coming to a war, not a parliamentary session,” said leftist lawmaker Cecilia Moreau as she entered Congress ahead of the debate.

Milei’s controversial economic reforms have sparked violent protests this year, with police firing teargas at stone-throwing demonstrators who have overturned and set cars on fire.

“We assume that acts of violence are being planned… and in light of this, a special security operation will be carried out. Attacking Congress is attacking democracy,” presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni said Tuesday.

Congress can overturn Milei’s veto with a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers, where the ruling party is in the minority, and divided.

However, several lawmakers with the centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR), the driving force behind the law to increase pensions, announced Tuesday that they had changed their position and are now in favor of the veto.

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