“Never Stop Dreaming: The Life and Legacy of Shimon Peres”, recently premiered on Netflix, tells of the Israeli recipe applied by the former prime minister, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, to contain the hyperinflation of the Middle Eastern country in the mid-1980s.
Richard Trank’s 2018 film (two years after the death of Shimon Peres aged 93 in September 2016), with accounts of George Clooneyarrived on the streaming platform on July 13, and is required material in the red circle of Horacio Rodriguez Larretawho studied the case during his recent visit to Israel.
Shimon Peres he was elected prime minister in 1984, with 44 votes. He did not have the majority to build a government without opposing him, so he suggested having a rotating government: during the first 25 months Peres would be the prime minister, and isaac shamir he would be deputy prime minister and foreign minister. And the following 25 months, the positions would be reversed.
Peres was sworn in as prime minister on September 13, 1984, and after fulfilling his first campaign promise to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon, he faced Israel’s disastrous economy: the country’s inflation rate was one of the highest in the world and several economists warned him that he could exceed 1000% per year if the ascending spiral was not cut.
Investors were fleeing the country, abandoning industries, and prices in stores rose every day. Peres’s pulse did not tremble. He assembled a team of scholars and economists who designed a plan that involved heavy cuts in all sectors. “I called one cabinet session that lasted 36 hours”, the former prime minister recalled before the end of his days.
“In that meeting I reminded everyone. I cut 500 million dollars in Defense. It was the largest cut in Israel’s history. I cut even in Education. The area minister was my best friend, and that was the end of the friendship. All the ministers accepted the cuts in other portfolios. Neither wanted to cut back on their own ministry. But I told them: ‘Gentlemen, either accept it, or I’ll fire you all.‘. In 36 hours whoever blinked was reminded of their budget”, Peres recapitulates in the central interview of the Netflix documentary.
“I got criticized from all sides, but to my great surprise, the harder it was and more insistent I became, I noticed that there was a change in public opinion. Day by day my polls started to go up. And against all odds, in 6 weeks inflation began to fall”, Peres reviewed in an interview upon leaving the presidency of Israel at the age of 90.
Israel’s inflation fell in 1984 from almost 500% a year to 16%. And Peres’ approval rating exceeded 70%, the highest ever recorded in the country by a leader. But “hawk” of Jewish politics (his real last name was Persky, but he changed it to Peres, which means “eagle” in Hebrew), he knew how to step aside as he had promised, honoring the political agreement with Likud that allowed us to get out of the crisis.
Several voices from his party, Israeli Labor, tried to influence him to call for new elections, which he would surely have won. But he said to them: “gentlemen I gave them my word, I’m not going to change it”. “I knew from experience that if you don’t keep your word you will never be a leader,” says Peres in the documentary, whose surname in Hebrew also means fissureone that would seek to close there for the good of his country.
“The most important thing that Israel had is a political agreement. And once Israel brought down inflation, a period of phenomenal economic growth began based on knowledge, education and technology”, Rodríguez Larreta marked after his visit to Israel, where he met with two Cordovan economists who led the program to stabilize and reverse the inflationary trend, Manuel Traitenberg and Leonardo Leidermann.
“You have to take fast decisions, not in 100 days, but in 100 hours since the first day. A very clear rate must be set, which does not necessarily mean that inflation will drop from 500 to 0 percent”, Rodríguez Larreta himself endorsed in Israel, where he traveled with the Secretary General and Secretary of International Relations, Fernando Straface, and the undersecretary of International Relations, Francisco Resnicoff.
“The recipe is clear. A broad political agreement and a reduction in state spending, with budget cuts in all ministries to control the deficit. Horacio’s will surely be a war cabinet. I understand that it is better this way, more compact, with fewer names and ministries, but with weight”, confesses one of the shipowners of the Head of Government of Buenos Aires. And he also rescues from the Netflix documentary, the peres positivity in the face of adversity.
In “Never Stop Dreaming: The Life and Legacy of Shimon Peres”, which incidentally functions as a phenomenal overview of a century of Jewish politics, the former prime minister recalls an anecdote from his childhood that defined him. He was fighting in the street with a bigger friend to see who could knock down who. Time and time again, Peres ended up on the floor. The grandmother, who was following the requests, intervened: “Enough is enough.” But he did not give in: “maybe I’ll win the next one”.
An optimism that Peres sought to spread first to put the nation on its feet. And then to convince her that the peace with arab neighbors was possible: he rightly won the Nobel Peace Prize for successfully negotiating an agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Yasser Arafat.
“He is the type of man who teaches that leadership must be optimistic, and that we must think about how to forge a better tomorrow. There were discouraging moments, but he never allowed those moments to make him retire, “says George W. Bush in the documentary.
“That optimism was fundamental for him. It was the reason that unlike many people who seem to disappear as he gets older, he seemed to have more energy, and to be a magnet even among the young, because he never lost that attribute, ”Barak Obama concludes. An optimism that his own Rodriguez Larreta pretends to radiate in front of the difficult scenario that he will surely have to face if he reaches the presidency.
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