As often happens when even the most optimistic understand that the Argentina is slipping with increasing speed into another colossal disaster, more and more are attributing the unsatisfactory state of the country to the reluctance of politicians to forget their petty differences and join forces. Many seem to believe that if everyone closed ranks behind a consensual program, which in their opinion they would if it were not for the selfishness of those who subordinate everything to their own petty interests, the country would achieve leave your difficulties behind and finally get going.
Among those tempted by what would be the umpteenth edition of the “great national agreement” that such well-meaning people have in mind is the presidential candidate Horacio Rodriguez Larreta. The mayor of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires he dreams aloud of leading an ecumenical government, one with several Peronist legs to make it truly representative, with the support of seventy percent or more of the electorate. So, he supposes, it would be possible for him to mobilize the country to pull it out of the slimy swamp into which he is sinking.
An odd product of the conviction that politicians’ propensity to waste time fighting each other is at the root of the national debacle is the notion that it would be a good thing if Mauricio Macri and Cristina Kirchner hold a “summit” that, in addition to making possible an armistice that would serve to reassure people, would allow them to talk constructively about national problems with the aim of reaching an overcoming synthesis that would put an end to the antinomies that many believe have maintained paralyzed the country.
All in all, although it would be positive if the two former presidents, and their followers, agreed to exchange opinions in a civilized manner, their respective political and economic ideas that it would only be a dialogue of the deaf. As for the desire that a meeting would serve to eliminate the “crack”, the only thing that could generate an eventual marriage of Kirchnerism and its most tenacious opponents would be a monster comparable to certain beasts of Greek mythology such as the Minotaur that was born from the union of the wife of the Cretan king Minos with a bull.
The saving consensus thing is a nice fantasy but, unfortunately, it is based on an illusion. The chronic Argentine crisis, which is almost a hundred years old, is not due to political divisions, which exist in all parts of the world, but to institutional precariousness aggravated by the emotional commitment of too many people with facile schemes, whose faith in the presumed qualities therapeutic consensus is one more manifestation. As bad as it weighs us, the fact that an overwhelming majority supported a wrong political and economic strategy, as has happened so many times since the middle of the last century, does not mean that it will work. Rather, it will ensure that the catastrophe that so many feared when they adopted it turns out to be even worse than anticipated. As bad as the “inheritance” that Macri’s team bequeathed to the selection of “scientists” formally headed by Alberto, it was evident from the first moment that they would fail even more painfully than his predecessors.
Be that as it may, the leaders of Together for Change they trust that, if only by ruling out, one of their own will move to the Casa Rosada after the next presidential elections are held, but the victory that, thanks to the disastrous management of the Front of All of Alberto, Cristina and Sergio, for now it seems assured, it will be a poisonous chalice if the members of the new government lack both firm and realistic ideas about what they would have to do for Argentina to recover, in addition, of course, to the ability to carry out carry out what they propose. The “hawks” of the PRO like Macri and Patricia Bullrich understand it very well, in addition to their ally Ricardo Lopez Murphy, but it happens that in a democracy it is not enough to be right; it is also necessary to have the acquiescence, if not the enthusiastic support, of a substantial part of society. Thus, it would be in the best interest of the leaders of Together for Change to concentrate on first persuading themselves of the need to take many unfriendly measures, and then convincing the public that it would be useless to ask them for more subsidies when members of the government current and its addicts have withdrawn to their winter quarters in La Matanza, since the state coffers will not contain money but piles of pending bills
In Argentina, the crack or, if you prefer, the most important antinomy continues to be the one that keeps political reality separate on one side and economic reality on the other. Kristalina Georgiev, the Bulgarian in charge of the International Monetary Fund, summed up the problem when he pointed out that “there are pressures from the public that go against what is best for them, pressures to increase expenses when it is not something they can pay.” Needless to say, the contradiction thus highlighted, and the will of so many politicians to take advantage of it by committing themselves to doing the impossible, make Argentina’s prolonged decline understandable.
Even so, while it is legitimate to assume that very few will benefit in the long run from the rampant inflation that is crushing society, depriving it of the elements it will need to recover, many feel entitled to insist that it would be very but very unfair force them to bear part of the costs of curbing it. This is what is being done by a multitude of business lobbyists, union leaders, piqueteros bosses, political activists and others, whose vigorous efforts to defend themselves harm the weakest, beginning with the millions of people who are already destitute and those who will soon be.
The great challenge faced by those politicians who aspire to govern the country is to get a critical mass of the population to adhere, if only because they see no other option, to a program of drastic reforms that, needless to say, would have to be very different from those that, over the years, have been supported by the majority. Still, while there are signs that those aware of the urgent need for the political class to turn its back on the flabby statism to which so many continue to pay homage are gaining ground in the cultural battle, they are far from having overcome resistance to “structural” changes. ” that would be necessary for the country to make better use of its material and human resources. Although at this point there are few who would vindicate the current status quo, there are many who tenaciously cling to the ideas on which it is based.
Both abroad and within the country there are skeptics who are convinced that, to save itself from ruin, Argentina would have to pass through the gallows of a socioeconomic crisis even more brutal than the one it is already suffering, one that is sufficiently wild enough to teach the population that, when they allowed themselves to be deceived by Kirchnerism and its allies of traditional Peronism, they condemned themselves to a miserable collective future.
The attitude of those who think this way is similar to that of the emblematic liberal (when it came to the economy) Alvaro Alsogaray, that at the beginning of 1976 he opposed the military coup that everyone knew was imminent not because he disliked the military regimes but because he wanted the government of Isabelita Perón to collapse in the midst of a gigantic socioeconomic conflagration that, he supposed, would frighten the population so much that they would never more would vote for a Peronist presidential candidate. Needless to say, the military, whose priorities were different, did not pay attention to his advice; Alsogaray He had to wait a few years for a government, that of the heterodox Peronist Carlos Menem, to try to apply some of the remedies he recommended.
However, the local Trotskyists and their friends are far from the only ones who take seriously the old revolutionary slogan “the worse the better”. Libertarians such as Javier Milei and José Luis Espert also know that their political hopes depend less on their own merits than on the unhappy consequences of what voluntaristic politicians are doing, guided by Cristina and her acolytes, who imagine themselves capable of manipulating piacere all the economic variables had and to have.
The libertarians foresee that not only the Peronists but also the great men of the radical wing of Together for Change will continue to perpetrate such serious errors that, sooner or later, the majority will resign themselves to the fact that it would be better to bet on economic ultraliberalism, which would be feasible, if Well, an eventual electoral triumph of Milei or someone of similar ideas would be due less to a genuine conversion to the creed they preach than to the discrediting of the alternatives. In any case, it is to be expected that the social emergency caused by an economic crisis that, if the doomsayers are right, could culminate in a generalized collapse, will continue to intensify until it acquires dimensions so large that the State, reformed or not, will necessarily have to play a key role in national life for much longer.
