Like the Peronism of which it is an excrescence, Kirchnerism knows very well how to take advantage of its own failures. For Cristina Kirchner and their addicts, the enormous crisis to which they have contributed so much presents an opportunity they do not intend to waste. As the money they need to distribute among their adherents runs out, they have chosen to rage against the consequences of their own management; according to them, It’s all the fault of “oligarchs” backed by a mostly Buenos Aires middle class that “hates the poor” and those who seek to defend them against the vultures of the International Monetary Fund.
Since there are no investors willing to bet on Argentina, the only conceivable solution to the great problems facing the country would have to come from an eventual increase in the productivity of the national economy, but from the point of view of those who follow Cristina, help o, At the very least, to stop hindering the businessmen and the men from the countryside would be equivalent to collaborating with “the right”.
There has never been a shortage of doomsayers who warn that very soon Argentina would suffer a social explosion of gigantic proportions due to the ineffectiveness of the ruling party. Is what they are saying acolytes of Cristina as Axel Kiciloff and Roberto Feletti, who insist that the social situation does not give more because things are getting very ugly. They are trying to displace the leaders of Together for Change in the role of more virulent opponents of the government of Alberto Fernandez. They trust that the hawks and doves of Pro, radicals and others will allow it because they don’t want the economy to fall apart if only because they understand that they themselves will soon be in charge of running it.
According to those who claim know what’s going on in the vice presidential head, Cristina believes that in the coming weeks millions of poor people will rise up in rebellion against the “IMF’s” economic policy. It is not that she has an alternative at hand, but that she has calculated that opposing the course taken by the government that she herself put together will help her recover parts of the political power that has slipped through her fingers.
As long as there is money, members of governments like the Kirchnerist can use it to build power; The militants of La Cámpora would not dream of letting others deprive them of their positions until the boxes they manipulate have been completely emptied. When that happens, those worried about their own future will leave the government to take the places that have been reserved in the opposition. Convinced like Cristina that the ruling party will suffer a catastrophic defeat in the next general elections due to its inability to manage the economy with a minimum of efficiency, they want to assure the people that they will not be responsible for their hardships, which, increasingly more explicitly, attribute to an alliance perverse of Alberto Fernandez,
Martin Guzman, Horacio Rodriguez Larreta, and Mauricio Macri. and, of course, the damned Fund technicians.
Given the less than brilliant circumstances in which the country finds itself, the strategy chosen by Cristina makes sense. Unlike relatively young characters like Kiciloff, he may not be thinking about the decades to come, but he knows very well that it would be disastrous for him to try to stray too far from the political noise, as would others eager to prevent their reputation from being tarnished by the next stages. of a crisis that is far from over, since until now his belonging to what the furious libertarian Javier Milei, and before him, the Spaniards of Podemos, call “la casta” has served to keep Justice at bay.
Be that as it may, Cristina has every reason to believe that it is not in her interest to continue appearing as a key member of a government that, in the opinion of all but a handful of “Albertists”, is leading the country towards a monumental calamity from which It would be very difficult for him to recover, if he ever manages to do so. By the way, it is not necessary to be a prophet to foresee that the less than two years that Alberto theoretically has left in the Casa Rosada will be atrocious and that the following ones, with another trying to reorder the broken economy that he will have inherited, will turn out to be equally hard. for the bulk of the population. For Cristina, then, it makes sense to want to set herself up as the leader of the most intransigent wing of a new opposition front in which she could be accompanied by violent Trotskyists, as well as picketers who have made arrogant begging the basis of a poverty-stricken political philosophy. In his opinion, it would be worse than useless to waste time trying to defend what was done by the guy who made him president.
Will Cristina be able to become the main scourge of the ruling party of which, until recently, she was the undisputed leader? It is possible but unlikely. While his stalwart adherents are more than willing to lend themselves to the metamorphosis he has in mind, there is every reason to believe that his power of attraction has dwindled so much in recent months that his maneuvering in this direction raises questions about his state of mind. If she continues to give the impression that she feels cornered and doesn’t quite know what to do anymore, she is in danger of being seen as a spiteful maniac surrounded by members of a small sect of nostalgics who would lack the power to provide her with the protection she so clearly needs. In such a case, what she would expect would not be only the pain of not being that she so mortifies those politicians who, after reaching the top and being idolized by multitudes, are discarded by the voters, but years behind bars. .
for l alarmThe faithful of Cristina and, without a doubt, to herself, it would seem that Justice is beginning to wake up. Indeed, everything suggests that the judges of the Supreme Court and other influential magistrates are as alarmed as anyone else by the prospects that are opening up for the country and, finally, they believe that an effort must be made to restore respect for certain basic rules, hence the ruling that condemned the former governor of Entre Ríos and former ambassador to Israel, Sergio Urribarri, eight years in prisonand the arrest of a couple of truck drivers linked to the Moyano family.
For now, these are just signs that a sector of the Judiciary is tired of playing a passive role, limiting itself to honoring, if only by omission, the barbarities routinely perpetrated by so many politicians, but for those anguished by what is happening and, even more, for what could happen in the coming months, more judicial activism would be very positive. After all, among the causes of the country’s prolonged decline is the contempt that too many politicians, trade unionists and others have for the law.
Another cause of the tragedy thus supposed is the widespread conviction that economic realism, the willingness to recognize that two plus two equals four, is reactionary and therefore every decent person has to repudiate it. As Chile’s leftist president, Gabriel Boric, has just reminded us during his brief visit to the country, “fiscal responsibility is a duty and not an ideology.” Needless to say, the refusal to understand this simple truth is at the root of the terrible drama that the country is experiencing. To alleviate urgent problems, one government after another has bet that something miraculous will happen so that a new increase in public spending does not cause further inflation or, due to attempts to pay for it by intensifying tax pressure, further suffocate the productive country.
As a result of the principled refusal to recognize that resources are limited, inflation is gaining strength accompanied by the growing resistance of industry and the countryside to resign themselves to being squeezed. Not only the government but also many members of Together for Change, in addition, of course, to the experts in turning misery into a lucrative business that the “social movements” and trade unionists manage, want there to be more plans to help those who they barely survive. Although the emergency to which they allude is very real, any increase in social spending would further weaken a viable Argentina, which very soon would make the situation of the millions of men, women and children who depend on subsidies even worse.
Faced with such a gloomy panorama, it is understandable that many fear that the country has entered a phase in which the battles that are being waged over increasingly scarce resources turn violent, as has indeed been the case in Peru and other countries. region of. Until now, Argentina has remained amazingly peaceful, perhaps because the crisis has not suddenly worsened but little by little so that the many affected have been able to gradually adapt to the fate that has befallen them, but there is no guarantee that patience like this expressed is infinite, especially if the feeling continues to deepen that the government created by Cristina has lost all contact with its own bases and, needless to say, with the citizenry as a whole, well before the date set by the rigid electoral calendar.
