“We are not living in a normal country,” repeats Patricia Bullrich (67 years old, Buenos Aires) during the campaign. Argentina is not a country for “administrators or economic theorists,” but for someone like her, she says, with “the necessary strength to restore order.” Bullrich was comfortably installed in that space where the values of liberal democracy mix with extreme positions that strain the system without breaking it. Just six months ago she was the favorite to win the presidential elections this Sunday in Argentina. Peronism was falling apart in internal fights and Together for Change, the alliance that brought Mauricio Macri to the Casa Rosada in 2015, only hoped that power would fall into its hands in October. But Javier Milei intervened.
The far-right candidate took away from Bullrich the idea of change and also his destructive capacity of the old, that is, Peronism in its leftist Kirchnerist version. La Piba, as they call it, is now third in the polls, even behind the Government candidate, Sergio Massa. “Say yes to a real change, to the change of Together for Change,” he now pleads in the videos that his teams spread on social networks. It is a last minute attempt to neutralize the transfer of anti-Peronist votes to La Libertad Avanza, the new force of the Argentine extreme right.
Patricia Bullrich went through a profound political conversion. With her fingers in a V, her curly black hair and her gaze upward, 50 years ago she showed anyone who wanted to see her that she was a Peronist. And she’s not just any one. In 1983, when a camera captured her with that iconic gesture, Argentina was living in the twilight of the military dictatorship. Bullrich had just ended an exile that began in 1977 that took her to Brazil, the United States and Mexico. Her militancy in Montoneros, the guerrilla group of revolutionary Peronism, had put her in the crosshairs of Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship. She was the sister-in-law of one of the leaders of the organization, Rodolfo Galimberti, and under his command she participated in a couple of failed attacks in Buenos Aires. Forty years after that militant return, Bullrich represents the most traditional right. She defends abortion and respects sexual diversity, but those are the only nuances of her.
His metamorphosis began in the early 2000s, when he joined the Alliance government, headed by the radical (social democrat) Fernando de la Rúa in coalition with the progressive Peronism that had renounced the neoliberal policies of Carlos Menem. She joined first as Secretary of Criminal Policy, then she was Minister of Labor and later of Security. She left the Government in November 2001, a month before everything blew up as a result of the banking corralito. She returned to active politics in 2007 as a deputy, but already within the ARI, a party founded by Elisa Carrió, a radical dissident who would later end up joining Together for Change. She completed her political metamorphosis in 2015, as Macri’s Security Minister. She dressed as a soldier and flooded social media with videos in which she seized stashes of drugs, picketed protests, or arrested criminals.
“It’s going to end, the military dictatorship is going to end,” shouted the young people of the seventies. “With me, this is over,” Bullrich writes half a century later, but to refer to former president Cristina Kirchner and her movement, Kirchnerism. The candidate sees that there is the sum of all possible evils, the origin of the last stage of the recurring processes of Argentine collapse. In a campaign spot she promised to open a maximum security prison for corrupt people that she would name after the vice president. She also calls for a country that “destroys, dynamites and disarms the economy that Kirchnerism generated.” The use of dynamite excites those who are fed up with the economic crisis. Here, says Bullrich, there is no longer room for “the lukewarm” and only “going all out” will allow us to restore the lost order.
Paradoxes of politics, Milei’s extremism has placed Bullrich at the center of the spectrum. He has even been left out of the conservative trail that runs through the region, with important figures such as the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador or José Antonio Kast in Chile. A Bolsonaro will be in Buenos Aires this Sunday, but he will go to Milei’s campaign headquarters.
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