If Argentina were that utopian “normal country” alluded to by those wishing to see it return to the place in the world it occupied at the beginning of the last century, a couple of broad parties similar to PRO and the UCR would have gotten used to alternating in power . Although the two have in common the attachment to democratic forms, they disagree when it comes to other issues. Like the moderate conservatives in other latitudes, the leaders of PRO tend to prioritize citizen security over the rights of criminals and would like to reduce public spending to make it more manageable, while the radicals believe they are center-leftists and therefore They therefore feel compelled to pay more attention to the social impact of government decisions. From the point of view of those who do not agree with the opposition coalition, it will only be a matter of nuances, but, as is the case in other parts of the world, they are not unimportant in the eyes of those members of Together for Change who are behaving as if “normality” were already a fact and they could afford to underline their internal differences, attacking each other without worrying about the repercussions in a country that is rolling downhill at a frightening speed.
As annoying as it may seem to some, in the current circumstances, the dissolution of the marriage of convenience that the PRO and the UCR have celebrated would have no good consequences since it would deprive Argentina of the only sensible alternative that exists to what Hipólito Yrigoyen would have called “the deceitful and unbelieving regime” that still dominates it.
Mauricio Macri opened the hostilities between the partners in June by describing Don Hipólito as a “populist”, in such a way implying that he shares responsibility with Juan Domingo Perón for having injected the national body politic with the virus of rancorous demagoguery. He was right – among other things, Yrigoyen encouraged the politicization of the public administration with the aim of filling it with radical militants – but, as Macri soon recognized, he made a serious mistake by giving his partners, who had never wanted him, a pretext unbeatable to mistreat him. In his particular universe, Yrigoyen remains a revered figure.
There are radicals, among them Facundo Manes and Gerardo Morales, who have never hesitated to express their repudiation of macrismo, and others, such as the equally ambitious Martín Lousteau, who have preferred to maintain a more ambiguous position; They kindly talk with Macri one day and then accuse him of representing “the right”, a dirty word in the radical lexicon. For the toughest members of PRO, Lousteau, who has approached the mayor of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and presidential candidate Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, is much more dangerous than the other co-religionists; They fear that, in exchange for the promise to help promote the candidacy of the head of the Buenos Aires government, he will manage to seize what they believe is his fiefdom, which for them would be a disaster.
There are many radicals who are convinced that their own party should take advantage of its numerical advantage and its geographical ubiquity to assume command of Together for Change, with the PRO, which in their opinion remains a neighborhood party, as a minority partner. It seems unnatural to them that, since the convention they held in March 2015 in Gualeguaychú, the UCR has been under the intellectual tutelage of a party whose instincts seem alien to them. This somewhat strange situation was due to the realization that, for reasons that were not arbitrary, a substantial part of society distrusted the radical capacity to govern the country with the firmness that it would clearly need. In the opinion of the party leaders, in order to come back to power they had to close ranks behind a candidate with a clearer profile than any of their own.
When Macri speaks of “light populism”, he shoots arrows at the Achilles heel of radicalism, since over the years the old party has acquired a reputation for being too lukewarm to face the challenges posed by an impoverished country in crisis. permanent. Do doubts about the strength of the radicals remain in the past? Those who are rebelling against the thinly veiled tendency of PRO “hawks” to treat them as electoral cannon fodder think so.
It is not a minor matter. The heavyweights of the opposition coalition understand that it is more than probable that, before it reaches its end next year, they will be in charge of a country with an economy in ruins, an inflation rate of well over one hundred percent per year , a multitude of companies in a comatose state, if they still exist, and tens of millions of desperate people on the verge of destitution. Then, they will have to choose between immediately applying a brutal shock policy – “a scythe”, according to Lousteau – on the one hand and, on the other, a version that is presumably slightly more intense than the “gradualism” essayed by Macri in the initial phases. of his management until the markets punished him so ferociously that he had to seek refuge in the arms of the International Monetary Fund.
In the opinion of Lousteau and other radicals, society simply would not tolerate a harsh policy such as the one envisioned by the most resolute macristas. They may be right, but that does not mean that the alternative they have in mind is better. In times of crisis, refusing to make extremely unpleasant decisions can make already dire circumstances even worse. As much as the radicals cling to the principle that one must always “subordinate the economic to the political”, the voluntarism thus manifested is only an expression of wishes, since there is no guarantee that the strategy proposed by the well-known could work. intentional people who wanted to protect people from the consequences of the crisis.
Stimulated by the polls and by the chaotic management of the Peronist group that took charge of the country almost three years ago, many seem to have reached the conclusion that the next government will necessarily come out of the internal Together for Change, reason why it would be better for them to concentrate on it without worrying about anything else. Although it is possible that they have been right, it is also true that the electorate ends up taking the opposition coalition for a bag of irresponsible cats as petty as the Kirchnerists, to start looking for another alternative. This is what Javier Milei expects, who looks with delight at the conflicts that are opening cracks in “Together for Charges”.
In the opinion of Macri, Bullrich and others from the less accommodating wing of PRO, Milei has contributed to enriching the national political debate thanks to the enthusiasm motivated by liberal ideas that are taken seriously in other parts of the world but that here were considered so evil that Few dared to talk about them, with the result that, for many years, those interested in political issues were limited to arguing about the relative merits of different variants of populism.
Although there are few radicals who are impressed by Milei’s preaching, the more realistic understand that it would be a mistake to minimize its effectiveness. By insisting that, in order to escape the deadly trap into which it has fallen, the country will have to completely repudiate the corporate ideology of “la casta”, Milei continues to conquer wills in areas that both the Peronists and their adversaries believed to be their own. For now, it seems unlikely that he will be able to establish himself as a true presidential candidate, but if he turns out to be as convulsive as some foresee in the coming months, the outlook against disruptive characters like him would become much more promising.
Although the scheduled elections are less than a year away, much could happen in the assumed time frame. One can understand, therefore, the alarm felt by Senator Alfredo Cornejo, a radical who has become notorious for his realism, in the face of the rebellion of a group of co-religionists against Macri’s recent prominence. He had to remind them that “he is our ally, despite some of them,” and “in the next elections we are going to proselytize with him and with his people.” Although Cornejo himself has criticized Macri on several occasions, he takes it for granted that it would be useless to declare war on him before the citizens have elected a new president.
Will it be Macri? Everything suggests that he would love to enjoy a second time, but he cannot ignore that his mere presence in the Casa Rosada would be enough to make those who, if only because of his last name, see him as the living symbol of capitalist evil. , neoliberal and alienizing. He knows that, from the first moment, the next government, even if headed by someone as inoffensive as Rodríguez Larreta or a radical, will be besieged by furious mobs armed with tons of stones backed by individuals capable of going to any extreme in defense of your privileges. While by now most understand that the country is no longer viable and therefore needs to be restructured urgently, few want the changes to harm them personally, so it would be surprising if the next president’s “honeymoon” lasted more than a breath
