The technicians of International Monetary Fund they don’t know what to do with it Argentina. They will have concluded that almost all the ills that afflict it will remain incurable unless the country undergoes a multitude of reforms that no government representing the popular will would be willing to undertake. It will be for this reason that they have resigned themselves to hoping that the undemanding agreement that, to the indignation of many foreign specialists, has been drawn up, will serve to keep the country afloat for a while longer. It would be, then, a kind of placebo that, hopefully, will keep quiet the most complaining patient of the multinational organization that acts as a clinic for very serious socioeconomic patients who cannot fend for themselves.
Nor do they know what to do with the country who usually accuse the IMF to privilege the numbers above flesh and blood people and to treat everyone equally without taking into account local particularities. So far, it has not occurred to any such eminence to come up with something that could be useful to those in government, unless it is a matter of continuing to supply them with propaganda ammunition that they can use to disqualify their opponents.
Also, although the economists of Together for Change imply that they have already put together a rescue plan that would allow the country to quickly climb out of the hole into which it has fallen, they are reluctant to be more specific. It is not that they suspect that the government could appropriate what they have in mind, but rather that they understand very well that any realistic plan, no matter how brilliant, would be furiously denounced not only by the Kirchnerists but also by members of the opposition coalition that supported it. would qualify as inhumane or worse, as indeed happened in 2001 when Ricardo Lopez Murphy tried to convince other members of the government to Fernando de la Rua that, given the circumstances, it would be advisable to reduce public spending.
Back then, the radicals did not hesitate to kick out the heretical bulldog for the unforgivable crime of wanting to adjust. They preferred to leave the matter in the hands of the market which, months later, with the help of a Peronist emergency government, would carry out “the dirty work” with its usual viciousness. Although some opponents and many government supporters continue to assert themselves against the adjustments, at this point even the most dogmatic in this regard will understand that Argentina has already begun to experience one that is turning out to be extremely brutal, one that is not due to pressure from the IMF but because the country has become into a pariah without access to financial markets.
The bewilderment that virtually everyone feels when they think about the prolonged debacle that Argentina has been involved in can be understood. Here, the political has been separated from the economic for so long that trying to reconcile them is a waste of time. They are different universes in which the rules are totally different. Even the most modest economic projects are incompatible with political ones. To prosper, they would have to have the approval of the majority thatAnd, needless to say, he has plenty of reasons to distrust leaders who, like the alchemists of other times, promise to transmute everything into gold – this is what the Kirchnerists did before taking power again in December 2019 -, but they only manage to produce trinkets .
The situation in which the country finds itself is so serious that no one wants to govern it. Although it is common to allude to the supposedly insatiable “vocation for power” of the Peronists, the truth is that they are born opponents who, since the middle of the last century, imagine themselves in a position to offer the world an alternative superior to all other existing creeds and therefore to have. It is natural, then, that Cristina Kirchner and her son Máximo envy opposition leaders so much that they would like to take their place. So is the fact that the leaders of Together for Change refuse to please them; They don’t want to hear about “co-government” and insist that, for constitutional reasons, they won’t be able to take on any more responsibilities until the end of next year when, they hope, one of their own has won the presidential election. For understandable reasons, the opposition fears falling into the trap that the Peronists are setting for it, but its position increases the risk that, well before the date set for the next elections, those most affected by the brutal adjustment that is underway will rise up in rebellion against the political class as a whole.
As the consequences of the decline – which does not go back to the seventies of the last century, as some say, but to those that preceded the Second World War – become worse and worse, there are many Peronists who are mentally prepared to adopt new truths as long as they allow them to preserve their “conquests”, but reality has become so complicated that all alternatives seem bad to them. Unfold again, with a sector, which would be temporarily led by Alberto, in favor of a certain austerity to placate the IMF and another, which would respond to Cristinacontrary to any measure aimed at reducing the fiscal deficit, would only sow more confusion, as has been done by the untimely resignation ofe Máximo to the leadership of the bloc of pro-government deputies.
Populism can thrive when everything is going smoothly and the corridors of the Central Bank are crammed with gold bullion. So yes, it is easy to distribute, but in a time of very skinny cows in which the only thing that works is the little machine, the populists feel victims of implacable dark forces. Thus, it would not be too surprising if Alberto and company were already thinking about the possible advantages of throwing in the towel so that others take care of the disaster that, according to government propagandists, is the work of the satanic Mauricio Macri and therefore it would be fair that the engineer and his accomplices will end up paying the bulk of the political costs of what happens in the coming months.
To respond to those who mistreated him for talking bad about the United States just when he needed Washington’s support for the decaffeinated agreement he is willing to sign with the IMF, Alberto tried to make people think that the target of his words was the president’s archenemy Joe Biden, his predecessor Donald Trump,
for having pressured the agency to shower the Macri government with money in order to make it more difficult for Macri to return to power Christina and her friends. But it was not a matter of anything more than Trump’s prejudices. Although the amount lent to Macri’s Argentina may have seemed excessive to them, both North American Democrats and European leaders of different stripes agreed with the extravagant orange man that a new Kirchnerist government would be a disaster for the country and, perhaps, for the rickety world financial system.
Unfortunately, nothing that has happened since Alberto began his administration could have convinced them that they were wrong. From his point of view, the excursion to Russia and China of the president, when he managed to appear before Putin as a great admirer of the late Soviet Union and, before Xi Jinpingof the even deadlier Mao regime, confirmed that they were right in predicting that a new Peronist government would be even worse than before
In other latitudes, almost all those interested in the sad vicissitudes of modern Argentina look to populism, that is, to Peronism, for the basic cause of the socioeconomic calamities that have brought it to its present lamentable state. As it could not be otherwise, they are perplexed by the willingness of a significant proportion of the electorate to continue asking the Peronists to solve the most distressing problems. In other parts of the world, a history so full of unforced disasters would have motivated the expulsion of the responsible movement from the political scene. or, at least, it would have transformed it into a small sect of nostalgics. To the frustration of many, this is not what has happened. On the contrary, until now at least, Peronism has benefited from the disasters it has been involved in and there is no guarantee that the current one will be enough to completely discredit it.
What is the reason for the phenomenal capacity of the quintessential populist movement to take so much political advantage from its own failures? In part to its protean nature: since its ideological principles are wonderfully flexible, it can change them all at once, as it did in the decade won by Menem when a variant of Filo-Yankee neoliberalism was in fashion, without the believers in the founder’s legacy feel guilty for nothing. The Peronist custom of making life impossible for any intruder who manages to occupy “Perón’s house” for a while also has a great impact. It was largely due to the fear of the “helicopter” that Macri opted for the “gradualist” strategy that ended up defrauding those who operate in the financial markets to such an extent that they decided to turn their backs on him.
