Kirchnerism is drenched in nostalgia for the 1970s. For Cristina and her most bellicose soldiers, Argentina continues to be a battlefield in which they, the good guys, fight to the death against different manifestations of “the right.” Which, needless to say, is awful. “Macri, rubbish, you are the dictatorship” they shouted when the engineer headed the national government. And, according to Axel Kicillof, the same right, that is, all those who wanted to curb inflation by reducing public spending as is done in the rest of the world.is so unfailingly cruel that, to carry out the adjustment that he has in mind “is willing to kill people.” Since for now he thinks he needs to ingratiate himself with Cristina, Sergio Massa has added the ultras K’s favorite catchphrases to his rhetorical arsenal.
For these characters, almost nothing has changed in the half century that separates us from the “dirty war” that was waged between equally bloodthirsty gangs that paid tribute to death and that, deep down, had much in common that set them apart from the bulk. from his compatriots who just wanted to live in peace. They do not tire of claiming “the fight”; trapped in a crude version of the Nietzschean eternal return, fantasize about replaying over and over again the confrontations of the glorious decade, although they take for granted that the immediate results must be very different.
Everyone is unaware that the warnings by Kicillof and company carry a thinly veiled threat. They are preparing to react with extreme violence to any attempt to reorder an economy that, thanks largely to the attachment of the Buenos Aires governor and Cristina to archaic voluntarist theories, the Kirchnerists have programmed it to self-destruct.
To make matters worse, they have managed to make the impoverishment of millions of people an extremely valuable political good.. When it is almost impossible for those who have been ruined by the government of Alberto, Cristina and Sergio to make it to the weekend, let alone the end of the month, it is natural that many cling tenaciously to the status quo even when they sense that it is unsustainable. .
The strategy of the Kirchnerists who are supposed to represent what Cristina calls “the decimated generation” has a seventies logic. The most fiery militants take it for granted that, in the war they are waging against “the right”, violence is legitimate. Although it is convenient for them to affirm respect for “bourgeois democracy”, after an eventual electoral defeat they will retreat to their strongholds with the purpose of taking advantage of all the many difficulties that a usurping government will face. In his opinion, it will merely be a masked reissue of military tyranny.
As a result of all this, Economy Minister and presidential candidate Massa is faced with a dilemma. It has to choose between ensuring that a hypothetical government of Patricia Bullrich or Horacio Rodríguez Larreta -we will rule out for now the alternative offered by Javier Milei- receives a bomb that is about to explode, and arranging for one of its own to inherit an economy that at least be manageable. From the point of view of many Kirchnerists, it would be better if the “unity” candidate of Peronism lost the election because they are eager to launch as soon as possible the rebellion against the severe adjustment that they see approaching, but it is to be assumed that Massa himself, an inveterate optimist if there are any, thinks he is capable of winning it.
According to traditional criteria, the Kirchnerists and their fellow travelers are well to the right of their most prominent adversaries, but both here and in other parts of the world, militants from authoritarian and oligarchic movements have managed to upend the schemes that prevailed until about sixty years. So that, politicians who in the not too distant past would have been categorized as centrists or even social democrats are located towards the far right of the ideological mapwhile characters who in other times would have figured as fascists occupy niches in the space reserved for the progressive left. In today’s Argentina, being in favor of monetary stability and the fiscal discipline that usually accompanies it is “right-wing”. So is opposing rampant corruption and wanting the convicted to end up behind bars.
The pro-government supporters who insinuate that Together for Change wants to install an imitation of the military dictatorship have an important ally: Elisa Carrió. In words virtually identical to those used by Kicillof and Formosa’s governor for life, Gildo Insfrán, who recently spoke of “the cruelty” of the macristas and prophesied “bloodshed” if such monsters returned to power, Carrió accused the former president and the pre-candidate Bullrich of being determined to apply “a very brutal adjustment” to the middle class. and insisted that they would not hesitate to repress with murderous ferocity those who dared to protest against such infamy.
If what was said by Kicillof, Insfrán and, of course, Carrió is taken to the letter, the next government, be it Juntos por el Cambio, the Peronist homeland or the followers of Milei, will have to choose between allowing the economy to fall in pieces and try to keep it intact even when, in order to defend public order, it is forced to use force as is customary in such circumstances in all democracies on the planet. This is not a pleasant dilemma but one that, despite many, those in government will need to face in the coming months because the rickety Kirchnerist “model” is about to disintegrate.
If politicians refuse to take care of the coming adjustment, the market will which, needless to say, will not pay any attention to those who protest against the blows that it would surely inflict on very broad sectors of the population. Refusing to assume responsibility for what would happen in such a case could seem attractive to politicians who want to draw attention to their own social sensitivity, but it happens that it is due to the moral cowardice thus assumed that Argentina is in danger of sharing the fate of countries sunk in chaos and misery like Venezuela and Haiti. Whether those who think they are “leaders” understand it or not, sometimes it is up to them to make unsympathetic decisions because refusing to do so will have even worse consequences.
It is to be assumed that, when they began their management, Cristina and those around her took very seriously the heterodox recipes that Kicillof and others of similar mentality had prepared. They will have imagined themselves owners of a superior alternative to the austere proposals recommended by the anti-popular economists of imperialist organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. It was a fantasy, but rather than abandon it as soon as it became clear that easy voluntarism didn’t work in the real world, they chose to stick to their guns.
Like their Cuban friends, they consoled themselves by assuring themselves that what they had proposed was so wonderful that they would have to defend it even if it meant letting the country they ruled fall into an abyss of misery. It will be for this reason that they have decided to try to take advantage of their own failure by adopting an action plan based on the slogan “the worse, the better.” They want Argentina to do very badly because they hope that the next national government will end up engulfed in flames.
For those willing to subordinate absolutely everything to the political power they need to preserve their personal freedom and the fortunes they have amassed, threatening to make the country ungovernable is not without sense, but it happens to carry the danger for them that the electorate, duly frightened For those who accuse those of Together for Change of wanting to massacre piqueteros, wayward trade unionists and rented protesters, try to save yourself by electing Massa. ANDIn such a case, the most Machiavellian Kirchnerists would fall victim to their own cunning. Although they would not hesitate to use force to suppress a possible rebellion that they would attribute to “the right”, they would find themselves in charge of an economy that they themselves would have bankrupt and that the then President Massa would try to repair with measures that the extremists K they would denounce as “neoliberals”.
Those who have launched the official fear project cannot but understand that it must necessarily fail; if it turns out to be effective, they will fall into the trap they have set. C.All in all, somewhat prematurely, they speak as if they were already on the plain and needed to equip themselves with pretexts to justify street violence. Cristina herself and the caciques of La Cámpora moved to an opposition “space” a long time ago. For a while, the other members of the official cast were reluctant to follow her example, but it would seem that even Massa has added his voice to the K chorus that is trying to prevent a government that has not yet taken office from carrying out structural reforms so that the country’s economy can recover of the degenerative disease that for so many years has kept her bedridden, with tragic consequences for tens of millions of people.
Image gallery
