Although no one knows who will hold the presidency at the end of next year, most take it for granted that – as long as nothing really serious happens – by then a person legitimately selected by the citizenry will have put on the corresponding sash and will have the baton in their hands. As it is a matter of the only thing that seems predictable, the various members of the great political family are trying to build alliances that, in their opinion, will help someone from their own “space” get the votes that will allow them to succeed in the tournament that has already taken place. initiated. For many, electoral politics is an end in itself, a fascinating game which, fortunately, does not entail too many responsibilities.
There are those who disagree, but although some opposition leaders understand that winning elections is one thing and governing with solvency, especially in a country as complicated as Argentina, is another that usually requires very different talents, for now they are concentrating on their own internal in which the radicals want to free themselves from the tutelage of the leaders of Pro who, according to the polls that are circulating, continue to lead the list of presidential candidates. Of these, the best placed, thanks to his reputation for being an effective administrator, is usually the mayor of Buenos Aires. Horacio Rodriguez Larreta although, to the surprise of many, the actions of Mauricio Macri they have started to rise again and, of course, Patricia Bullrich remains in the running. .
Would one of the three be in conditions, or another arisen from Together for Change, of forming and leading a strong and coherent government of the kind that Argentina so clearly needs? The future of the country could depend on the answer to this question. Unless he soon has one who, in addition to being strong, possesses the moral authority to carry out a series of far from simple reforms that his adversaries will try to thwart by any means possible, the country will continue to roll downhill, which is still far from bottoming out.
This is not a new challenge. Since the first half of the last centurythe awareness that the country could not recover the verve of other times without a government capable of doing something more than “managing the crisis” in the hope of delaying the outcome predicted by the many doomsayers, gave a certain spurious legitimacy to a series of military coups and, in the eyes of many, made the corruption of populist governments that boasted of their desire to “change history” but that, with the exception of the Carlos Menem in a phase of their long administration, they did not dare to try to dismantle the existing dysfunctional model. How could it be otherwise, the symbiotic relationship of militarism on the one hand with the corruption and ineptitude considered inherent to “civil democracy” on the other, had a very negative impact on the evolution of the national political culture.
While experience has taught us that a “strong government” it can be even worse than a weak one, in recent years the country’s situation has become so bad that the alternatives it faces have already been reduced to a minimum; it can adapt to the prevailing conditions in an increasingly less equal world, which would require a tremendous joint effort that only a strong government could coordinate, or resign itself to playing a humble and demeaning international role that, at best, would earn the approval of professional protesters who celebrate the failures of others but it would be unspeakably catastrophic for the bulk of the population.
Unfortunately, so far those reluctant to settle for the unhappy collective fate thus hinted at have failed to formulate a “narrative” as effective as that of the very conservative-minded populists who have dominated the political scene for decades. It would seem that those who warn that “the devil has all the best songs” are not mistaken, but unless those who resist letting Argentina continue to fall manage to create a “story” that serves to convince more people that, with such that it is proposed, the country could emulate Italy and Spain and even South Korea which, until just a couple of generations agowere much poorer, there will be no way to prevent millions more from falling into extreme poverty.
Almost everyone agrees that the Argentine debacle is of political origin, but perhaps it would be more realistic to describe it as cultural since, in sovereign democracies at least, the apothegm cruel of the Savoyard Count Joseph de Maistre according to which “every people has the government it deserves”. It would be worthwhile, therefore, to remember that the rapid socioeconomic progress that, to the surprise of others, certain societies have enjoyed at different times has always been driven more by the general will to improve of its inhabitants than by government pressure.
This is what happened in the England of the Industrial Revolution, the 19th century Germany, the Japan of the Meiji Restoration that “westernized” at a frenetic pace without abandoning many of its own traditions and, of course, in today’s China whose dizzying economic growth began when, in 1979, Deng Xiaoping, bet on the free market. Authority does not have to lead to authoritarianism, which, in the long run, is usually counterproductive.
In such societies, which in their own way have “meritocratic” values, the fervor for education was, and in some cases still is, contagious. Affects everyone. While here it is routine to insist that education is “a right” and that therefore the current government is responsible for the shortcomings of young people, which is why some insist on reforming the system as if a new scheme modified the behavior of students, in some parts of the world it is taken as an inalienable personal duty and even the illiterate understand that refusing to take advantage of available opportunities is equivalent to attacking the common good. In East Asia, it is an obligation assumed by all without any government feeling constrained to intervene.
It goes without saying that, just like the “work culture” that so many politicians talk about to suggest that those who live on subsidies should acquire it, the will to learn has to be a matter of common sense that no one, poor or Ignorant though he was, he would think to question. Is this the case in Argentina? It would seem not; the ideologically motivated custom of treating education as a right that the current government is depriving young people of, without emphasizing that it is also a duty, it has contributed a lot to the prolonged national decline.
In a situation like the one we are experiencing, it is undoubtedly natural that those in power would want to flee from the crisis and limit themselves to trying to take advantage of it by declaring themselves innocent and attributing everything bad to the perversity of their political opponents. This is what the government of Alberto Fernández has done, which, it seems, does not believe it is obliged to find solutions to the country’s socioeconomic problems because, its spokesmen assure us, they are all the work of Macri, if not of “neoliberalism”, hence his disconcerting fear of taking risks by devising something resembling “a plan”.
Such an attitude is not due to the conviction, which certain libertarians might share, that the markets will always have the last word, since it would be a waste of time to make economic projections, but because all the officials that make up Alberto’s staff are surrounded by political commissars linked to Cristina and her eldest son who, in many cases, would like to apply measures that would have even worse consequences than those already tried.
For the leaders of Together for Change who, since last year’s parliamentary elections, believe themselves destined – one could say, doomed – to form the next government, the not exactly stellar performance of the Pan-Peronist ruling party made up of Kirchnerists, followers, if there are still any, of Sergio Massa and, Presumably, a handful of characters who were impressed by the Alberto who criticized Cristina with ferocity, is a warning that they will have to take very seriously. Although an agglomeration of dissenting factions may succeed in elections, success thus assumed does not guarantee that it will be capable of forming a good government. Unless those of Pro, the various internal lines of the UCR, the supporters of Elisa Carrió and the “republican” Peronists unite around a viable common program, their planned administration will not take long to generate a sense of paralysis that would serve to further demoralize those who already have every reason to believe they have been abandoned to their fate by a political class that often seems more concerned about the fate of its members than that of the bulk of its compatriots. This being the case, if they cannot close ranks behind a project that is ambitious enough, and tough enough, to offer the country a way out of the Dantean dark forest in which it is lost, the eventual return to power of the coalition that was created by Macri will take him to hell.
