Argentine crisis questions Peronism’s capacity for power

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – There is a political maxim, and therefore unquestionable, that says that only Peronism can govern a country as complex as Argentina. Those who proclaim it give examples: when the government of the radical Raúl Alfonsín was sinking into hyperinflation in 1989, Carlos Menem arrived to put things in order.

In 2001, after the fall of another radical, Fernando de la Rúa, Peronism was in charge of pulling Argentina out of the hole, this time with Eduardo Duhalde and Néstor Kirchner. Almost 20 years later, Mauricio Macri left the country in default, with a debt with the IMF of US$44 billion and inflation above 50%.

Once again, Argentines embraced the Peronism’s salvation plank. But the facts now call into question the party’s ability to solve the most profound crises. Argentines have gradually lost faith in the president, Alberto Fernández, and his vice-president, Cristina Kirchner.

The discouragement in the street was already evident before last Saturday, when the accelerated resignation of the former Minister of Economy, Martín Guzmán, revealed the depth of the crisis in the Palace. The minister’s slamming of the door was the consummation of the slow but persistent demolition process that Kirchner had undertaken against the president and his most loyal entourage.

The choice of a new minister took almost 48 hours due to their lack of agreement. The duo had not spoken to each other in private for months. Finally, the name of Silvina Batakis emerged, an economist from Kirchner’s entourage who, at the same time, promised to obey Fernández and comply with the IMF agreement signed by her predecessor, Guzmán. A political oxymoron.

Fernández and Kirchner have spoken to each other again. They did so at least four times during the last week. The fear of a definitive debacle convinced them of the fragility of an alliance born in 2019 against nature, with a vice president with votes imposing in the Casa Rosada, a president without them.

“We Peronists are like cats. It seems that we are fighting, and in reality, we are reproducing,” Juan Domingo Perón used to say to justify the tensions inherent to the political construction. What is in question now is that capacity of reproduction of which the founding father boasted so much.

“This crisis is hitting Peronism very hard,” warns Pablo Touzón, political scientist and director of the consulting firm Escenarios. “We are facing a historical round in which it does not seem that this crisis can be solved through Peronism,” he says.

Vicente Palermo, the founder of the Argentine Political Club, is one of the political scientists who has studied Peronism the most. He believes the party’s capacity to solve crises “has no historical basis”.

“Peronism is structured in such a way that it carries within itself the conditions to produce or deepen crises so that they are self-generated and reach a situation of an explosion that later cannot be controlled,” he says.

As the most recent example, he gives the debacle that followed Perón’s death in 1974, with the assumption of his widow, Isabel Martínez, and the coup d’état of 1976. This idea that in Peronism there are the workers, those who can most sustain a government, can be applied in certain periods of history, but not always,” he says.

Claudio Belini, an economic historian at the University of Buenos Aires, agrees that part of the problem is that the social base of the original Peronism, which seemed unstoppable in the 1950s, has been lost. “Argentine society is no longer that industrial and union-organized society,” he says.

“The first Peronism showed a greater capacity to resolve some issues of the power dispute. But now, the Argentine state is different; it has lost the capacity to intervene in the economy and to discipline large social actors. That is why it is more complex for Peronism to deal with crises”.

KIRCHNERISM’S CROSSROADS

The markets greeted the new Economy Minister, Silvina Batakis, with a fall of the Argentine peso, debt bonds, and soaring inflation. Meanwhile, Fernández went into seclusion in the Casa Rosada, and Kirchner reappeared in public after a month. The vice-president joked that she did not intend to “revoke any other minister” of the Cabinet and, for the first time, she did not humiliate Fernández in public.

She charged, however, against former Minister Guzmán, whom she accused of destabilizing the government with his resignation. A truce had been consummated, the fruit of the need for survival. Kirchnerism is at a crossroads. It hates Fernández because it considers him a lukewarm man, but if he makes him fall, it knows that the crisis will explode in its hands. The goal, then, is to make it alive to 2023, when the presidential elections will be held.

“The problem is that Peronism is a coalition of an allegedly radical sector, in the classic sense, which is Kirchnerism, and an extremely conservative sector, which are the governors and the non-Kirchnerist tribes,” says Palermo. “And governing that coalition is very difficult because it is inconsistent. You have to reconcile many opposing interests,” he explains.

Minister Batakis is caught in those internal tensions. Everyone recognizes her ability as an economist, but there is a consensus that the gravity of the situation calls for names with more political experience. The discussion in the Casa Rosada is whether it will not be necessary to undertake a deep Cabinet reform as soon as possible to give oxygen to the management.

“The economy has its reasons,” says Touzón, “but the first engine is politics.” “A year ago, nobody talked about hyperinflation as they are now. It is not clear to what extent Kirchner’s perception that this will be a disaster makes it a disaster,” he adds. Touzón’s concern is that beyond Peronism, there doesn’t seem to be much else.

“In the 1975 crisis, with a broken Peronism, the military party was crouching to take over in a bloodthirsty way. In 1989, Peronism had already resolved its internal affairs, and Menem was there. In 2001 we had the entente of the province of Buenos Aires, with Duhalde and Alfonsín. Today, the question is who sustains the power vacuum, if the opposition is willing to occupy the central position,” says Touzón.

Whether the situation is terminal remains to be seen. The elections are 15 months away, and Peronism will put up a fight. Palermo recalls that the party still has “a solid territorial base in the cordon of the province of Buenos Aires”. The governors, the essence of power in the country’s interior, are increasingly aligned with Kirchner, evidence that they perceive the migration in the Casa Rosada. These will be months of much noise within the party.

With information from El País