We all know the story of the frog that jumps up immediately if some soulless person puts it in a pan of boiling water but that will be left to die cooked if it is heated little by little. The specialists in this somewhat remote matter agree that it is a slander; frogs are not that stupid. What about humans? The history of our genre suggests that while we tend to react quickly to imminent danger, we are inclined to tolerate a slow deterioration process until it is too late to reverse it.
Not only in Argentina but also in other countries with western culture, the last decades have been very hard for the old working class and a growing segment of the average that depends on routine jobs, while other sectors, which in their own way make up a elite, they have greatly prospered. For a long time, the gap between winners and losers widened without them protesting with the vigor of before until, in the United States, the discomfort of the many millions who felt left to their fate in a globalized and increasingly technocratic world That it was alien to them would make the emergence of Donald Trump possible and, in Europe, would motivate the rise of a heterogeneous variety of movements that, according to the defenders of what is now the established order, are right-wing, if not right-wing.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the relationship between “the elites” and those who oppose them is characterized by mutual misunderstanding. The problems that haunt them are so different that it is as if they speak radically different languages that, to those unfamiliar with them, the other’s is nothing more than a string of unintelligible grunts. Something similar has happened here not only because of the “crack” that separates the Kirchnerists from those who do not like or understand them, but also because of the one that the political class has dug to prevent common people from forcing their members to render due accounts.
Will the movements of repudiation of the official order, so to speak, that have proliferated in other countries with Western traditions have their equivalents in Argentina? Until now, no one has appeared who looks like Trump, Jair Bolsonaro or others who have known how to become leaders of those who feel betrayed by the permanent political power of their country. Those most opposed to the prevailing system are the libertarians Javier Milei and José Luis Espert, but the truth is that they do not have much in common with characters such as the North American magnate, the Brazilian militarist or the flamboyant polemicist Éric Zemmour who, for a while, seemed to count with the necessary support to defeat Emmanuel Macron in the next French presidential elections. As for the Trotskyists, they represent a retro alternative for those nostalgic for the old revolutions, of which there are many.
Even so, since the electorate took advantage of the opportunities offered by the primaries and parliamentary elections to express its rejection of Kirchnerism and, to a certain extent, its faith in the benefits of the opposition, the feeling has intensified that, in Bottom line, there is not much difference between the members of the two dominant coalitions. The grossly irresponsible behavior of various members of Together for Change has had an extremely negative impact on public opinion by spreading the impression that, with few exceptions, politicians are much more interested in their own affairs than in what is happening to his compatriots in a stage overshadowed by the pandemic in which the majority are having a very, very bad time. By the way, the will of legislators to take vacations at the least indicated moment or, needless to say, of those of Buenos Aires to allow mayors, with their entourages of secretaries and councilors, to remain eternal in the baronies, by the way, did not help at all. to inflate the already grotesquely oversized state sector of the province by creating 25 thousand more positions.
Efforts by determined politicians to further discredit the union to which they belong coincided with the beginning of a new tax offensive and with rumors of segmented rates to come. Although it is to be assumed that for publicity reasons the ruling party would have preferred to reduce taxes, the truth is that they could not refuse to do so without abandoning their particular project. The State, the great distributor of the resources that a very high proportion of the country’s inhabitants need to survive, necessarily has to finance itself and, since the little machine is not in a position to do so indefinitely, it has to depend, as all governments do in the rest of the world, of what it manages to raise.
Be that as it may, although it is logical that both the national and provincial governments want to increase tax pressure, there are limits to what they can extract from the productive population without leaving it totally exhausted. There are signs that they have already been transferred, so that, without credit in a world that is tired of having to participate in the inexplicable crisis in Argentina for many and therefore is not willing to lend one more penny, it will be forced to reduce the fiscal deficit, that is, to adjust with even more ferocity than what, helped by inflation, it has done so far surreptitiously. In spite of Martín Guzmán and his eventual successors, from now on it will not be possible for them to try to privilege social peace over production. Attempting to do so will only ensure that, when it does occur, the resulting outbreak is even greater than is already expected.
Until now, the public has been surprisingly patient. Like that fictional frog, it has tolerated without rebelling a process of impoverishment that has been much harsher than that suffered by so many North Americans and Europeans. Unlike the peoples of other countries, it has endured hardships without reacting with violence, such as the French, or voting in favor of leaders who until recently did not appear in the stable political cast as has happened in other Latin American countries. The persistent illusion that there is a genuine alternative to the current ruling group, that the opposition, was the Peronist when the radicals or macristas were in power, or who would form Cambiemos when it was the turn of the Peronists to govern, will have contributed to popular stoicism. He would be able to harness the latent energies of the country so that he would finally get up and start walking like almost everyone else has done.
In recent weeks, this much-needed illusion has weakened. Since the parliamentary elections showed that the government of Alberto and Cristina had lost what the Chinese called “the mandate of heaven,” almost everyone’s eyes are on Together for Change; what they have seen has not been anything encouraging. In addition to the failure of the leaders to discipline turncoats chosen by those who believed them to be real opponents and disguised non-government officials, or to legislators more interested in tourism than in legislating, it became clear that the Pro has not yet acquired the decisive mass that it would allow it to be an authentically national party and not merely from Buenos Aires, while those radicals who do not hide their desire to displace their partners in the leadership of Together for Change seem to have forgotten the history of failures that almost eliminated their co-religionists from the national scene .
To recover, then, Let’s Change, Together for Change or Together would have to consolidate itself as a coherent amalgam willing to commit to a well-defined program that is both realistic and electorally acceptable. Achieving it would not be easy for them. The country’s structural distortions are so serious that it is very tempting for everyone to try to hide behind moralizing banalities and allusions to one’s own ethical superiority, but unfortunately, in the current circumstances to behave like this is pure escapism. It is also important for politicians to try to isolate themselves from the society that logically corresponds to them to serve, dedicating themselves to taking advantage of the opportunities to conserve and, if possible, make more valuable the many “conquests” of their own, hence the passion that so many share for the charges. Alberto Fernández’s strategy is simple; It consists of surfing the crisis and hoping that the opposition will continue to make mistakes, be they serious or only verbal slips that the Kirchnerists can take advantage of to convince the electorate that the opposition leaders are as bad, or even worse, than themselves. It will work? It is possible, since unless Mauricio Macri, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, Patricio Bullrich, Gerardo Morales, Martín Lousteau and the others manage to effectively manage their own “space”, it would be difficult to believe them capable of giving Argentina the government that so clearly needs to. As is the case in almost all other democracies, then, until further notice the country will have to settle for the lesser evil, that is, for what there is, however mediocre this may be from the point of view of those who would like to believe that they deserve much more.
You may also like
