Many Americans believe that Joe Biden he is a highly corrupt politician; Judging by the available evidence about his son’s international adventures, they may be right. Others are convinced that donald trump he is even worse than the man who defeated him in the November 2020 elections. And there are those who, based on information that is in the public domain, assume that both have enriched themselves through illicit means. Something similar, although in a less scandalous way than in USAhappens in other democratic countries, even in those where sometimes a former president, like the Frenchman Nicolas Sarkozy, sentenced to several years in prison for having broken the law, but Argentina may be the only one in which a character with a record as packed with evidence that is difficult to dispute as Cristina has managed to dominate the political scene for more than a decade with the enthusiastic support from a multitude of left-wing “idealists”, intellectuals, popular artists, judges and even the supreme pontiff of Rome who, one would suppose, is the moral guardian of the Catholic flock to which so many claim to belong.
This is not an anecdotal detail. The fact that the reasons to doubt the adherence to the law of “the doctor” are so overwhelming has contributed enormously to aggravate the already terrible chronic debilitating disease that the country has suffered for who knows how many years. Would it be possible to close “the crack” that anguishes the well-thinking without demanding that everyone pretend to believe that Cristina Kirchner is he really innocent of the charges against him? Of course not. If it were only a matter of discrepancies around the economic direction, let’s say, Kirchnerism could start rational dialogues with the other forces, but it happens that something much more fundamental is at stake. Unless almost everyone resigns himself to vindicating what the majority takes to be a crude lie, there will be no way to bridge the abyss that separates the political currents that are in conflict.
It is not a secret that, for Cristina, her own freedom and that of their children is an absolute priority, hence their desperate efforts to uproot the Council of the Judiciary, which Horacio Rosatti he already presides, from the hands of the Supreme Court. The vice president’s obsession with what she calls “lawfare”, that is, with the insolence of those jurists who treat people like her as if they were mere common mortals, is behind her uprising against the government headed by her creature, Alberto Fernández , under the pretext that the relatively innocuous arrangement that Martín Guzmán reached with the International Monetary Fund is unbearable.
Had it not been for the keen concern that Cristina causes him his little promising legal situation, his attitude towards what was happening in the country would have been radically different. Although at this point it is useless to wonder how her own management and that of her husband would have evolved if, from the start, the two had behaved like paragons of rectitude, there is no doubt that the results would have been very different and, to a good sure, decidedly better for the country and its people than they actually were.
Likewise, even if he did not like the economic measures tried by Alberto and the precarious team that accompanies him, if it were not for his problems with the law, he would have refrained from ordering his followers to have fun by sabotaging them. Cristina may be incapable of feeling remorse for what she did when the opposition was divided into half a dozen little pieces.but it would seem that the knowledge that it would not be possible for him to convince an even-tempered judge that he never illegitimately appropriated a single peso has infected his mind, leading it to adopt positions that would otherwise have seemed to him insane.
Whether they understand it or not, the unconditional ones who do not hesitate to kneel before their leader, celebrating all her whims as if they were geniuses, the corruption that has been the most shocking characteristic of the governments of Nestor Kirchner and its main heir is the original sin of the powerful political movement that the couple founded, the flaw that has distorted it so much that today it poses a danger to democracy since, to defend their boss, militants are willing to go to virtually any extreme. They cannot ignore that the repeated attacks against the Supreme Court -or better said, against the Judiciary and therefore the rule of law- are due exclusively to its desire to purge Justice of those judges, prosecutors and others who might be reluctant to place it above the law and the most basic ethical principles. Nothing similar has happened lately in the rest of the democratic world. Only in dictatorships, such as that of the bellicose Russian Vladimir Putin, whom he admires so much, has the ruling party operated in the same way.
It would be comforting to assume that consensual corruption is a pathology that only affects the political class and its business annexes, but this is not the case. It deeply affects the way of thinking and therefore the behavior of almost all other members of society. ABy privileging dishonesty so ostentatiously, leaders make more and more people feel that success or failure they do not depend on their own efforts but on the exchange of favors with those who are presumably in a position to help them, which is why paid militancy is experiencing a boom. Why waste time working if you earn more by participating in a meticulously staged campsite or street demonstration?
And, how could it be otherwise, it also has a very negative influence on young people who grow up in a society in which even presidential opinions are supposed to be for sale. Why study hard, if everyone knows that the merit thus achieved is a despicable bourgeois aberration?
None of this would happen were it not for the fact that millions of men and women, roughly a third of the electorate according to the most recent polls, are reluctant to take corruption seriously. It is not that all those who automatically vote for Kirchnerist candidates are convinced that Cristina, Amado Boudou, Julio De Vido, Jose Lopez and the others are victims of a perverse media campaign and the wickedness of venal judges, but they tend to believe that when taking advantage of the opportunities for profit, all politicians are equal but the Kirchnerists, perhaps because of the plebeian style that some operators cultivate , they seem more supportive than their macrista or radical rivals. It doesn’t help much to point out that the misery in which the majority lives is due to the prolonged Peronist reign in the suburbs of Buenos Aires and other impoverished districts. Both here and in other countries, political loyalties are based more on emotional preferences, not to say tribal, than on more or less objective analysis.
Needless to say, the not at all arbitrary feeling that the political class as a whole is hopelessly corrupt, if only because all of its members have become accustomed to rubbing shoulders with individuals who have declared war on the Justice system, which, for its part, has been vitiated by its ties with the most influential politicians, entails the risk that the gap that separates it from the bulk of the country’s population will widen even more, as happened for a while twenty years ago when convertibility fell and the cry “everyone leaves”. If the preaching against “the caste” by Javier Milei, which has lately adopted the very Cristina, because she fears being abandoned by those who have protected her, would make a rupture of the prevailing democratic system less improbable.
If the conviction spreads that the Peronist government, managed indirectly by Kirchnerists who are more interested in immobilizing it than strengthening it, is simply not in a position to mitigate the country’s most urgent problems -it would be excessive to ask it to solve them-, a significant proportion of the people might prefer a leap into the void than to wait until, at last, the possibility of exchanging it for another without having to throw overboard the rules established by the National Constitution. Indeed, were inflation to continue to break through the fragile barriers erected by the Alberto government, it would not be at all surprising if the resulting socioeconomic chaos would provoke equally disruptive political consequences.
Thanks largely to the errors perpetrated by the Kirchner governments and how disappointing the macrista interim turned out to be, the bulk of the population is about to go through an economic meat grinder that will destroy endless life projects. In order to recover from what awaits it, the country would need not only to have a good government but also a society that is vigorous and coherent enough to make the most of the human capital that it still has left after long years of living together. with systemic corruption, a disease that has damaged it so much that it would not be entirely easy for it to undertake the collective effort that will be required of it.
