Those who point out that without drastic reforms that at least for a while they will harm many people, the congenitally inflationary national economy, its reserves depleted and its productive capacity reduced, it won’t take long to go under, a disaster that would surely have even worse consequences for the majority of the country’s inhabitants than those that would be caused by an attempt to restructure it. Despite those used to the existing autarkic model, it has turned out to be incompatible with development.
So are those who warn that the measures that the next government, even when it is as Kirchnerist as the current one, will necessarily have to apply, could provoke extremely violent reactions. Aníbal Fernández takes it for granted that the Frente de Todos is fried and that therefore he can blame the opposition for what he sees approaching, streets “strewn with blood and dead” and other misfortunes, although presumably he understands that the same thing would happen if, to everyone’s astonishment, the citizens decided that it would be better to continue with Peronism and re-elect Alberto or make Cristina Kirchner, Wado de Pedro, Axel Kicillof, Daniel Scioli or, perhaps, Leopoldo Moreau president.
Anyway, at this point the evident failure of the management as Minister of Economy of Sergio Massa It should worry the opposition much more than the ruling party. He confirms, if there are still any doubts, that stopping inflation before it mutates into hyperinflation will require measures that are decidedly tougher than those tried by the Tigrense with the tacit support of Cristina and other Kirchnerist hierarchs. The fading – or temporary eclipse – of Massa’s political star may benefit Juntos por el Cambio electorally, but it also means that Alberto’s successor in the Casa Rosada will face an enormous challenge that relative success on his part would have made less daunting. .
Like Mauricio Macri at the time, Massa bet on gradualism in the hope of minimizing the political costs of what he would try to do, but the only thing he has achieved is to delay the moment of truth for a few months. Will it come before the elections scheduled for October, or after? Kirchnerists pray that the economic explosion will occur when others are in power, but, to their alarm, there are signs that they won’t even have time to try their luck with a bis “platita plan.”
By the way, if it happens more episodes like the one starring Sergio Berni in La MatanzaAnd if Kicillof’s image continues to fade from that of a somewhat clueless student activist to that of a vulgar demagogue, anything could happen. Jorge Ferraresi’s allusion to the helicopter that Alberto and his collaborators boarded in July of last year to get away from popular anger if the country were to be inundated by a hyperinflationary tsunami may have been premature, but several months will still have to elapse before they feel safe.
Unlike similar phenomena in other parts of Latin America, Peronism has been able to survive to the present day not because the governments it has formed have been good, but because a substantial part of the population has clung to the notion that it would be better to have him in power than in opposition because it is fully capable of preventing others from succeeding. It is likely that many continue to think so, but the concrete results of his most recent administration have been so bad that, if he takes the polls seriously, fewer and fewer are willing to support him.
However, as Aníbal has just reminded us, there are still some, beginning with the Kirchnerists and their conjunctural allies, who they refuse to give up a psychological weapon that for almost three-quarters of a century has served them wonderfully well. They trust that, once again, the widespread fear that they know how to generate by predicting horrors if they are not in power helps them to weaken their electoral rivals who, as things stand, for now are led by the two main candidates for Together for Change, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and Patricia Bullrich, and the anarcho-libertarian Javier Milei who, it seems, has become the most popular politician in the country thanks to the visceral contempt he swears to feel for the other members of “the caste” with the eventual exception of the “hawks” of PRO.
They say that Recep Erdogan, Turkey’s authoritarian president, once claimed that “Democracy is a tram: when you arrive at your stop, you get off”. Many Kirchner supporters agree with the definition attributed to the Islamist sultan. For them, democracy is at best an instrument and lacks legitimacy if others use it to gain power, which is why they Cristina and her faithful are preparing to make the most of the country’s problems in order to teach people that handing over political power to members of the opposition is not worth the risk.. Although presumably they are aware of their own deficiencies when it comes to governing, administrative efficiency has never figured among their priorities, since for them “the story” matters much more than mere reality.
They are far from alone in privileging imaginative abstractions over the interests of ordinary mortals, since virtually all of the great collective tragedies suffered by humanity since the Stone Age have been the work of like-minded people. Fortunately, although the more rabid local enlightened militants appear to be relatively innocuous compared to others of similar propensities that continue to sow death in Europe, Asia, Africa and some Latin American countries, this does not mean that they are incapable of doing a lot of damage if they believe that, given the circumstances, violence can be justified.
In addition to fearing that, at any moment, a sinister alliance of lumpen common criminals who do not hesitate to kill defenseless victims, drug traffickers with international ties and ideological fanatics could put an end to the precarious social peace that, despite everything that has happened, still prevails in the country, the bulk of the citizenry has more and more reasons to distrust political leaders who give the not arbitrary impression of being more concerned with their internal squabbles than for the fate of Argentina and its inhabitants. Needless to say, what has just happened within PRO has not helped to convince any skeptics that the opposition coalition is in a position to form a government that is more coherent than the current one. Rather, it confirms in the eyes of the most pessimistic that escapist irresponsibility is a disease that affects all members of the national political class.
Although the differences between Macri and Rodríguez Larreta are due to much more than the former’s desire to ensure that his cousin, Jorge Macri, is the next mayor of the Buenos Aires stronghold of PRO, which in his opinion is in danger of falling into the hands of radicals , since they are based on very different ideological visionsUnless Juntos por el Cambio not only stays formally united but also manages to make the internal rivalries that are inevitable in democratic organizations seem minor, the feeling will spread that the country is doomed to be governed by coalitions. too brittle to give you the firm drive you so desperately need.
Will the gruesome realism, which to many sounded like an expression of wishes, if not a direct threat, from Aníbal harm the Peronists? Some believe that it was equivalent to “talking about the rope in the house of the hanged man”; although no one is unaware that the country abounds in cultists of violence who would not hesitate to participate in street riots under the pretext of fighting for social justice, most understand that it is better not to allude to such possibilities. Be that as it may, since, come what may, the next government will have no choice but to choose between trying to put national finances in order by reducing public spending and resigning itself to a general collapse, those who are supposed to be destined to conform it it is up to prepare the population to face a very difficult and therefore conflictive stage.
Is it too much to ask. Here, as in the rest of the democratic world, Politicians prefer to refer to “great salaries”, “full refrigerators” and other good things, ignoring the difficulties that the community will have to overcome before reaching the land of promise. However, the situation in the country has become so serious that there is no more room for the fatuous optimism of other times when it comes to the immediate prospects, although, as long as there are no more prolonged droughts, the international financial institutions collaborate so that Finally, if Vaca Muerta is much more than a potential resource and the country manages to take full advantage of the lithium deposits and other minerals, in the medium term the long-dreamed of national recovery could cease to be nothing more than a fantasy.
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