When it comes to politics, one multiplied by three or four can equal zero. That is what has happened here. Currently, Argentina has several governments, including those of Cristina Kirchner, Sergio Massa, Alberto Fernandez and another ghostly one that is made up of officials who adhere to what they take to be a superior version of the official ideology and do what they please, but it is as if they had none because each one pursues their own ends without even thinking of trying Coordinate what you are doing with others.
For Massa, the fight against inflation that is devouring the country and impoverishing its inhabitants must be a priority, since its own future could depend on the results of its management, but Christina He does not want it to be too successful and is already thinking about how advantageous it could be for him to oppose the adjustment that the Economy Minister is applying to what, in theory at least, is his government.
For its part, Alberto is trying to get away surreptitiously from the madding crowd in the hope of surviving a few more months in the job the Boss gave him. Meanwhile, there are characters who hold positions in government departments that provide support to the Mapuche ultras that are wreaking havoc in Patagonia or picketers who are doing the same with their street demonstrations and camps in the Federal Capital, in addition, of course, to those teenagers and their dads who play revolutionaries, taking over schools for the purpose of pushing back the hosts of the fascist Horacio Rodríguez Larreta.
Lately, the sensation of lack of control caused by official ineffectiveness has become so intense that some say that anarchy has already taken possession of Argentina, while others, a little less gloomy, say that something is still missing; they speak of pre-anarchy, of the risk that soon the country will be scene of a hobbesian struggle of all against all, but even so, they imply that there is still time to restore a minimum of order before it is too late.
Be that as it may, the fact that day after day there are more disturbing episodes, some caused by characters linked to the heterogeneous Frente de Todos, suggests that in the national and popular field there are already more determined to take advantage of the country’s problems for their own benefit. than those interested in solving them. This is what happens when the militants of a movement in retreat are so demoralized that they conclude that it would be to their advantage to leave their opponents a scorched earth. This is what the Kirchnerists did when they prepared to deliver the symbols from power to Mauricio Macri’s team, but the current situation in the country is much worse than it was back then.
In any case, the bewilderment that so many feel at what is happening can be understood. Although the institutions seem to be working properly, the truth is that they hardly affect reality because the government, overwhelmed by difficulties that its members do not seem to understand, refuses to govern. His performance is so bad that the opposition leaders do not know how to react; the most ambitious prefer to oppose their internal rivals to waste gunpowder shooting against the reckless official chimangos. They know that picking on them wouldn’t do them much good.
The debacle that the Kirchnerists and their allies are experiencing is discrediting politics as such, which greatly harms the leaders of Together for Change who, after all, have to live with them. Thanks to the inflexible electoral calendar that the opposition is determined to respect, its leaders will have to spend another year on the plain and therefore tend to believe that they would be better off concentrating on the internals of their particular faction than it would be to risk explaining to the citizenship how he would govern if he asked them to try. Unfortunately for the opposition politicians, the fact that they have been given so much time to prepare to undertake the Herculean task that will fall to those who succeed the Kirchnerists in government, could be more than enough to sink them before the elections. It does not motivate optimism that, for radicals like Gerardo Morales and Facundo Manesthe main enemy is no longer the Front of All of Cristina and her friends but the PRO of Macri.
It is painfully evident that Kirchnerism is bankrupt. The stock of ideas that he inherited from his sixties grandparents did not contain many that could be applied more than half a century later and Peronism, despite the omnivorous eclecticism that characterizes it, does not seem to be in a position to contribute anything useful to it because it is congenitally distributionist; was born when, thanks to the Second World War, the country was enjoying a period of opulence -according to legend, it was impossible to walk through the corridors of the Central Bank because they were full of gold bars-, which was incorporated into its DNA oara that from then on he would feel obliged to distribute resources even when they were scarce.
As General Perón himself discovered when he was trying to better manage public spending, in the opinion of the faithful, “adjustment” is a cursed word of oligarchs, neoliberals and other vermin. It is for this reason that people such as Cristina, Máximo, Axel Kiciloff, trade unionists, picketers and the militants of La Cámpora continue to cling to this rudimentary but politically useful “truth”. Everyone agrees that if the economic reality requires an adjustment, so much the worse for said reality.
Kirchnerism is not for times of lean cows like the one that has touched us, but even when there are official strategists who know that it would be convenient for Together for Change to take care of the disaster, it is condemned to remain in government for a long time. because the boss and many others know that, deprived of the power it gives them, a not-so-good future awaits them. This being the case, the Kirchnerists cannot even allow supporters of another Peronist faction to replace them, such as the one headed by Massa, for fear of what would happen to Cristina in such a case.
Needless to say, politicians are not the only ones worried about what might happen in the coming months and years. Almost everyone takes it for granted that inflation, which appears to have “leveled off” at around 7 percent a month, will continue to erode their income for much longer. Likewise, in addition to having to face wildcat strikes such as the one that paralyzed the automotive industry, businessmen in the productive sector fear running out of supplies.
If those who are convinced that Argentina has already entered a perhaps prolonged period of chaos are right, virtually everyone in the country will have reason to look back with nostalgia on the recent past when it was possible to trust that the political leadership would find a way out of Dantesque dark forest in which she was lost. However, it would seem that both the ruling party and those who believe themselves destined to take their place at the end of next year, feel compelled to continue playing roles that they assumed when circumstances were more favorable than the current ones and they assumed that it would not be necessary to do drastic changes, and for many very unpleasant, to overcome the crisis in which the country has fallen.
It is traditional to attribute to the Peronists a “vocation for power” superior to that of others and to assume that it has given them decisive advantages when it comes to governing, but it is a half-truth. Although it is undeniable that, like the others, they have wanted to have more political power, their mentality has never been that of those who believe they are born rulers. Rather, they are oppositionists, people whose vision has always tended to be more negative than positive, who have stood out more for their willingness to attack what still remains of the Argentina of other times than for their eventual adherence to a “model” alternative. By the way, there is no doubt that in the Kirchnerist ranks there are many who would prefer the country to sink completely than to recover after adopting a program that they would describe as “neoliberal”.
In democratic societies, politics tends to be pendulum, with governments of the “right” alternating with those of the “left”, although today it is not usually easy to detect many differences that are not merely rhetorical. It is also frequent that periods that, according to historical guidelines, can be considered permissive lead to others that turn out to be more repressive. It is what happened with almost chronometric regularity when the country oscillated between populist civilian governments and military regimes that promised to restore order. Are we about to see a repetition, in a democratic key, of this cycle, since the “military party” disintegrated decades ago? It would be possible if a “charismatic” leader with the personal authority he would surely need to convince the country that he would be capable of putting an end to the growing anarchy that is causing so much alarm appeared on the horizon, but so far no aspiring to play such a role has managed to clearly differentiate itself from the rest of the national political class.
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