Who had noticed the new bourgeois class before the heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette Will they end up guillotined or in the excluded workers recently arrived from the interior before they crossed the bridges on October 17, 1945? Social transformations are slow and are processed silently, they are subterranean currents that are not easy to intuit, until one day they burst in, and then everyone says: sure, it’s obvious, it had to happen.
For this reason, to begin to understand the results of the PASO, I believe that, rather than thinking about great ideological changes in the electorate (“conservative turn”, “righting”), you have to analyze the state of society in its purest way, go see as low as possible. And you don’t need a doctorate in sociology to notice that Argentine society is splintered, broken into a thousand pieces after a decade of stagnation, of an economy that doesn’t work or resolve or show a way out, of a polarized political configuration that no longer It serves no one, years of pandemic and inflation.
If there was not a rebellion during this time that devastated everything with a single withering blow, as occurred in 1989 and 2001, it was because welfare policies played an effective containment role, because social movements channel discontent and because democracy continues to function, as if society, which two years ago had already sent out an alert signal breaking the abstention record, this time had been waiting for the electoral moment to arrive while patiently sharpening the dagger, to finally plunge it into the system body.
Since the electorate was divided into thirds (or quarters, if we consider the blank vote and abstention), anything can happen. Beneath politics there is a very different society from the one that built the crisis of 2001, Kirchnerism and Macri’s gradualisma new society that we are just beginning to know.
* Journalist and writer. Extracted from his column in Le Monde Diplomatique
by Jose Natanson
