For reasons that are painfully obvious, nobody wants to govern Argentina. Alberto Fernandez he preferred to be a decorative lame duck rather than give the impression of wanting to extend his term beyond the end of the year. Although he considers it useless, Cristina Kirchner he has no interest in taking his place. And there are Kirchnerists, like Jorge Ferraresi and Andrés “el Cuervo” Larroque de Pedro, who fantasize aloud about fleeing the scene of their exploits. The wife of Sergio Massa, Malena Galmarini, she says that if her husband were to accompany them, what would remain of the government would soon collapse. The president of the board of Argentine Water and Sanitation may be right.
The Kirchnerists barely hide their will to move into the opposition already, but, to their frustration, those who occupy that space refuse to allow it; they say the current government has to stay where it is until December 10th. In his opinion, they deserve to be sentenced to more months of hard labor. The fact that, with each passing day, Argentina, with its inhabitants inside, is getting closer and closer to a precipice does not seem to worry them.
Such an attitude sends society a demoralizing message. A good part of the citizenry intuits that if the opposition leaders trusted in their own ability to put an end to the almost hundred-year-old decline of the country, they would be exhorting the kirchneristas to pay attention to the defeatists -or realists- in their ranks and to call early elections so that they could get to work as soon as possible.
Is it what they are doing? Of course not. While such respect for the inflexible electoral calendar provided for by the Constitution may seem heartwarming in the eyes of Together for Change leaders, it means letting any serious attempt to curb the socioeconomic deterioration that threatens to of Argentina a southern version of Venezuela or Haiti.
The opposition’s lethargy is fueling the anger, not to say anger, of increasing segments of the population that feel betrayed by a national political class that is far from living up to its own claims, hence the spectacular irruption of the dynamiter Javier Milei, the champion of anti-politics. They do not attribute the attitude of the opposition priests to their alleged veneration because of the current democratic rules, but because of his fear of having to face a crisis that is devouring the country. They like to believe that constitutional times – as if there were no acceptable ways to end a government that has turned out to be staggeringly inept – have forced them to go slow so they can focus for long months on the internals and continue tinkering with their rhetoric to adapt it to the winds detected by their image consultants, but by behaving like this they make it seem that they wanted the present to last indefinitely. After all, it is your comfort zone.
Given the extreme gravity and complexity of the situation the country finds itself in, it is understandable that no one really wanted to take charge. Needless to say, the most determined to avoid responsibilities are the rulers themselves. The creator of the Frente de Todos, Cristina, speaks as if she contributed nothing to the colossal disaster that her machinations have caused. Alberto only makes big noises abroad, as in his visit to Brazil where, according to Lula, he was gratified with a lot of political goodwill but no money, or he rails against the Supreme Court because he thinks provincial politicians should take into account the laws of their districts. For their part, the militants of La Cámpora have fun making the other members of the government in which they hold posts stumble and taking advantage while they can from the boxes they manage.
As for Massa, the only member of the trio who gathered the strength to win the 2019 elections who seems interested in governing, he is condemned to try to make a synthesis of Kirchnerist thought and the extraordinarily soft demands of the International Monetary Fund. He knows it’s an impossible mission, but despite his notorious deviousness and his reputation as a man willing to risk going for anything, he doesn’t dare rebel against those who have him trapped.
The mental depression that the country is suffering is due less to the obvious failure of Kirchnerism than to doubts about the spiritual strength of those supposedly destined to take over. By the way, it has not helped that those of the PRO, the radicals, the followers of Elisa Carrió and the Peronist republicans have had several years in which to prepare for the gigantic task that, until the opinion polls stopped smiling at them, late or soon they would have to undertake. They have squandered them by obsessively concentrating on the internal ones and studying, with Byzantine meticulousness, the different variants of the adjustment that the next government, whatever its political complexion, will be forced to apply.
If the performance of the Kirchner government had been more or less satisfactory, the opponents would have been able to afford to spend a lot of time negotiating candidacies and positions, but it happens that it soon turned out to be even worse than that predicted by the most skeptical, so they should At the very least, they have tried to give the impression that they are determined to launch an ambitious reform program as soon as possible.
Sometimes a certain caution is commendable, but it is far from being so if people take it for a sign of weakness. By implying that it would take long months to draw up a government program, in addition to reordering the coalition they had formed, the leaders of Together for Change lost the support of many who, until the end of last year, saw in it a viable alternative. to the Pan-Peronist ruling party.
In Argentina, opposing the status quo has always been wonderfully easy. Even more than in other parts of the world, for many the national history is a chronicle of massive street protests that they remember with nostalgia. For unionists and fringe political factions, organizing them, mobilizing the poor or state employees, is the only thing they know how to do successfully. It is not surprising, then, that here the negative predominates over the positive and that, deep down, almost everyone feels an aversion to the “dirty work” that in their opinion means governing and that, unfortunately, usually implies being forced to make decisions that will benefit some and hurt others. Given that in the prevailing circumstances there are, and will be, many losers and, in the short term at least, very few winners, it is understandable that those who still hope to win in the next elections feel afraid and that the Kirchnerists are already thinking about how to take advantage of the difficulties they are creating to ensure that they too fail.
Are you about to change the political culture of the country? There are those who believe that the unfortunate consequences of twenty years of Kirchnerism, temporarily interrupted by Mauricio Macri’s four, will force those accustomed to supporting the populist messiah of the day to drastically modify their points of view. Those who think so are optimistic. The one who has benefited the most from the discredit of Kirchnerism has been Milei, an outsider who in his eccentric way is as populist as any member of “the caste”, since his popularity is due almost exclusively to the furious criticism he fires at his rivals. .
As much as he alludes to his stern Austrian mentors, the disruptive libertarian is a true representative of the protest tradition that has contributed so much to the country’s downfall. It may be that, thanks to his preaching, other politicians have begun to incorporate into their heritage ideas that they had previously repudiated as “neoliberal” or “ultra-right”, but it still seems unlikely that they would be willing to break with the largely populist consensus that, for many decades, has dominated national thinking.
As long as they don’t opt to leave sooner, the Kirchneristas still have more than half a year left in power. No one believes that in the time frame thus assumed it will be possible for them to stop inflation from accelerating further or, what would be even more important, to manage to accumulate some genuine reserves so that the industry can import the inputs it will need to continue operating. Nor will it be given to them to obtain significant investments. Thus, until further notice the country will depend completely on the IMF, that is, on the willingness of the United States and its allies to subsidize a serial defaulter for fear that its eventual collapse will have an explosive impact on world finances.
Massa finds himself with no alternative but to pass the cap through the economic centers of the planet, which is humiliating not only for him but also for the country. While you may point out that an appalling drought attributable to climate change has deprived Argentina of up to $30 billion, you will know that the sorry state of the national economy is not due to the cruelty of nature but to a self-destructive political tradition of which, if we are lucky, the Kirchner government will have been the culmination.
