I’m sorry. I was going to call this column “The Argentine Case,” and the words, as usual, laughed at me: with a minimal pirouette, they became “The Argentine Chaos.” Words, as we already know, say better than people: Argentina is chaos. Limp in the herd of unanswered questions sweeping the world is one I’ve been asked so many times: Why is this resource-rich, well-endowed, well-populated country the way it is? If anyone were to ask me today, I would tell them to look for answers, look at their choices.
2023 is strange, that means it’s an election year in Argentina. It’s the same in Spain: it means that one day there will be regional and local at the end of May and maybe national in December. In Argentina, if some god doesn’t prevent it, there will be ten or twelve voting dates this year.
Argentina has 24 provinces or districts. At the moment we know that two of them will elect the governor on April 16; another three on May 7; four more on the 14th; on June 11 only one. These are the confirmed dates: Elections are to be held in a dozen other provinces between June, July, August and September.
All because their governors – who have usually been in office for many years – want to separate their voting rights from national ones. The majority are Peronists, afraid of the poor choice their party will have in the presidential election and want to be re-elected sooner to avoid carrying that baggage on their ballots.
This confusion and dispersal shows how, in recent decades, the country has become an unstable confederation of very stable fiefdoms, with each provincial chief retaining command for decades and imposing conditions on the national chief — such as separating his elections from their power at the Finding a common option not to compromise. This confusion also reflects the mood of these bosses: I save myself and the rest kill themselves.
And to complete the picture, the most unlikely election is expected on August 13th. They are called PASO – Simultaneous and Compulsory Open Primarys – and send all citizens to vote in the internal parties. They were founded in 2009 by the Kirchners “to promote internal party democracy,” and their party has only submitted one candidate ever since: Your boss continues to choose his by hand and lets him choose the internal ones who can’t decide already – it’s already been decided . In other words, the PASO, this major mobilization of 25 million voters and 170 million euros, is a state-funded super poll that anticipates the results of the presidential elections without great accuracy.
Because two months pass between one and the other, and many things happen in two months in Argentina. Its first round takes place on October 22; the second on 19.11. Then Argentina will have had one or two elections a month since April, ten or twelve political circus dates, a year of pure electoral speculation. It is therefore not surprising that democracy has less and less prestige, fewer supporters, fewer voters.
Much worse, of course, is that 18 million Argentines live below the poverty line, that four million don’t eat enough, that annual inflation reaches 100%, that there is so little hope. But this spate of elections shows the difficulty of governing a dismembered country and the utter incompetence of the parties that do so. Nine months after the presidential election, the two who could win it are left without a candidate. In ruling Peronism, no one wants to be one because they are almost certain to lose given the economic and social situation they have created, and politicians have little calling to martyrdom. The only one to announce his intention to run is President Fernández, but his boss, Vice President Fernández, is waging war on him and trying to stop him – and besides, the man has very few chances.
(Meanwhile, that vice president announces she won’t appear because she’s “outlawed.” She’s referring to the trial that two months ago sentenced her to six years in prison for state fraud. But the jail and the ban on the public that Office will not take effect until the process has exhausted all its instances, in several years. In other words: that it is not forbidden for these elections. You can vote for it and exercise it, but now his whole policy is based on “refusing that “Prohibition” – which does not exist – and she repeats it incessantly, like any Napoleon in a mental asylum. And many repeat it with her: Chaos progresses.)
There are now at least seven candidates in the neoliberal opposition who are clamoring for honor and not resolving it. The one who could decide the fight is former President Macri, who four years ago was defeated by millions of votes after a very unsuccessful government – but he does not do so because he is also tempted to run, which all his enemies want and support financially.
Of course, the two groups avoid at all costs to explain their program, their vision of the country, their first actions – because they suspect that, as one Menem, a former Peronist president, said, “if I tell them what I… would do, they wouldn’t vote for me. “No one”. They talk about how badly off those of the other party or others of their own party are, just in case.
But it’s not hard to imagine their intentions, as these two groups have ruled the country for decades and are driving its decline with courage and fervor. Argentina has become a reactionary country: a country in which each government creates so many disasters that the next one is elected to counteract it, disarm it – and devote itself to producing its own. And then the next one is chosen to react against the previous one – and so the next one will be the previous one’s previous one: the vicious circle.
A reactionary country is a country without a project, made by slaps, shattered by slaps, a merry-go-round or merry-go-round country that spins and spins without advancing a single step. And that because of that, it’s become one where a man who calls himself a libertarian howls Bible quotes and declares he’s in favor of selling organs or children because the free market needs to be free – and has managed to fascinate a lot of young people People who are fed up with the usual politicians.
We Argentines know this: when it seems that nothing can be worse, we try and we achieve it. We could be masters at that, folks.
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