Agustín Rossi (Vera, 63 years old) was Minister of Defense for Cristina Kirchner and Alberto Fernández. A little over ten days ago, he left the leadership of the Federal Intelligence Agency to be head of the Cabinet of Ministers. His appointment seemed inevitable: he has a dialogue with both the president and his vice president, a pairing that is not talked about so much today. Rossi has a hard job ahead of him: he comes to office when the Peronist government has only nine months left in office and must face elections weighed down by internal disputes and the economic crisis.
Ask. Alberto Fernández enters his last year in government. What balance do you make of what has been done since 2019?
Answer. I think it is a very good government, with a lot of objectives that have been met. In economic matters we have the problem of the glass half full and half empty. In the glass half full is the occupancy level. We found the country with 12% unemployment and today we are between 6 and 7%. In addition, we have grown above 10% in 2021, around 5% in 2022 and we will continue to grow, although less, in 2023. We completed a three-year period of economic growth, which has not occurred for many years. In debit is inflation and, due to this, the fall in the purchasing power of wages.
Q. Why Argentina can not with inflation?
R. It is not a monocausal phenomenon. We receive the country with 54% inflation and inflationary inertia. We also have a bi-monetary economy. When we grow, the demand for imports is getting higher. In addition, in 2022, the war in Ukraine caused us a large increase in the value of energy imports. All this generates an impact on the trade balance and reserves. When you have an impact on reserves, the market begins to think that there will be a devaluation and expectations deteriorate. And in 2020 we injected a number of pesos into the market, with zero economic activity.
Q. What did they ask the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, when he took office?
R. Move away the devaluation expectation with the recomposition of the reserves, with creative recipes. We had good rates in October, November and December and, like all these things, there are situations that did not allow us to continue on this path, such as the drought [que impacta en el ingreso de divisas producto de las exportaciones agropecuarias].
Q. Were you surprised by the 6% inflation registered in January?
Q. We did not like it. Minister Massa said that he was angry with that index. But as our grandmothers used to say “a stumble is not a fall”.
Q. The opposition says that this government leaves a time bomb. What does he answer them?
R. The opposition in Argentina should learn to be a little more moderate and that this moderation comes from its own responsibility. He was not born from a cabbage, he was ruling until 3 years ago. If a candidate from Cambiemos comes and tells me that Argentina must grow for ten years, I tell him that he governed for four years and that in three there was a recession.
Q. Didn’t the fight between Alberto Fernández and Cristina Kirchner worsen the economic situation even more?
R. Definitely not. What has happened in Argentina is a mutation of the political system. 40 years ago, we recovered democracy from two political parties: the Radical Civic Union [UCR] and the P.J. [Partido Justicialista – peronismo]. Now, instead, we have two political coalitions. And coalitions are not made between those who think alike but between those who think alike. That generates tensions and debates. Both the pro-government and opposition coalitions have debates, often in the open. I don’t think that this has generated any kind of tension on the economic issue. Here are two coalitions that give stability to the political system.
Q. What are the differences within Peronism? One would think that Fernández and Kirchner think alike on many things.
R. We had different views that have to do with the speed with which politics moves and economic decisions are made. There was a very marked difference around the agreement with the International Monetary Fund, which is not exempt from the dispute for power, because there is also a question of leadership.
Q. Do you know what Cristina Kirchner wants?
R. I am not your spokesperson. I talk to her, but what I talk to her I don’t comment on. It is clear that she has played a very important role in articulating this political space. In 2015 and 2017, that space we call Peronism was an archipelago. Between 2015 and 2017 we were approaching positions. At the moment when Cristina says that she will not be a candidate and that she will accompany Alberto Fernández as vice president, she unifies all the currents. That was decisive in the triumph of the 2019 elections. I still think that unity is not enough, but without unity it is not possible.
Q. Why didn’t the “I’m not going to be a candidate” that Kirchner announced in December have a unifying effect?
R. In 2019, Cristina decides to design the architecture of the coalition and its formation. Today, the sentence against Cristina [a seis años de prisión e inhabilitación por corrupción] it has proscriptive effects and, therefore, Cristina is proscribed.
Q. But until the sentence is final in the Supreme Court, nothing prevents Kirchner from being a candidate…
R. One has to know which oxen to plow with. We have already seen what Lula’s experience was like. He was skipping the impediments to be a candidate until there was a sentence that deprived him of his freedom. The PT had to resort to a plan B with [Fernando) Haddad como candidato y terminó ganando [Jair] Bolsonaro. What Cristina does is not lend herself to speeding up the procedural times and what today is a sentence in the first instance becomes a final sentence that harms the entire political space.
Q. Will Peronism unite behind the candidate that emerges from the primaries for the presidential elections in October?
R. Definitely. We know that we may have differences, but the differences with others are greater than those we have between us. There is also a problem: just as there is a liberal democratic component within Together for Change, there is also a fascist component. That the president of the main opposition party [Patricia Bullrich, del PRO, el partido de Mauricio Macri]has not condemned the assassination attempt against Cristina is a concern.
Q. Are you afraid of the rise of extreme figures like Javier Milei?
R. The word is not fear, because I believe in the democratic reservoir of this people. If it were not so, kids who did not live through the dictatorship or the democratic spring would have been moved by the film 1985 [que rescata el juicio a los jerarcas de la dictadura]. But the growth of extremist and violent right-wing groups is a fact that can happen in Argentina and is already happening in the rest of the world.
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