In Spain, this summer, there were general elections. Millions were worried: it seemed certain that, hand in hand with the Popular Party, an extremist group would come to power that denies climate change and sexist violence, that seeks to eliminate sexual education and abortion and the autonomous system, that vindicates Francoism and censors those who think differently. Let’s face it: because of that fear, many who did not feel particularly attracted to the ruling alliance, who perhaps in other circumstances would not have supported it, decided to vote for it to avoid the abyss.
In Argentina this Sunday there will be general elections. Millions are worried about the possibility of a man coming to government who not only denies climate change and sexist violence, who not only intends to eliminate abortion and sexual education and vindicate the genocidal military and censor those who are different, but who He also wants to put an end to public health and education, to allow the trafficking of weapons and organs and possibly children, and for all of that he follows the advice from beyond the grave of his dead dog. The gentleman, of course, cannot stand any opinion that is not his own – and he proclaims it loudly because he has, he says, “the moral superiority.” The man is scary. The problem, in today’s Argentina, is that many of those millions who fear him cannot find any alternative: they do not know how to vote so that he does not win. Thus, the climate these days: confusion, fear, hopelessness.
Everything is played between three candidates. The deranged gentleman, Javier Gerardo Milei, was born in Buenos Aires in 1970, son of the owner of a couple of buses and a housewife, in the then modest neighborhood of Palermo. He was shy, he had a hard time getting along with others. He went to a priest’s school, wanted to be a soccer player and failed immediately, he played the drums with some friends who were covers of the Rolling Stones and also failed, he studied economics at a second or third rate university. He made a career for himself, he worked as a financial operator for one of the richest men in the country, Eduardo Eurnekián, owner of dozens of airports and so many other things. Eurnekián was, they say, the one who supported him for years. First, when he advised Peronist candidates and praised Obama. And later, when he began to become known for his shouts and insults in the media, especially against the State and its politicians, who – Podemos trembles – called “the caste.” In 2021 he ran for deputy and won the seat.
Since then he has not stopped growing: millions of people who would like to break everything supported this man who walks around with a chainsaw – copied from Rand Paul, an American far-rightist – to show that he is willing to break everything. These people do not think – they do not believe – that what they break can break their very fragile livelihoods, but it is so likely. In a very magical pass, the lord managed to take the place of the new: the old law of the jungle is presented as a novelty because its speaker has his hair disheveled, shouts and despises everyone else: “Tremble, you left-handed sons. “Whore!” is one of their usual slogans. (And among those “communists” he includes Pope Bergoglio, who this week, in an unusual gesture, gave an interview to the Argentine state press agency to answer him.)
With these subtleties, Mr. Milei managed to respond to the urgent need for something different: all the others did it so badly that “a 1% chance of change is more than what we already have,” say his voters, and that “so less they are not the same as always” and that it is worth trying. They are, proportionally, many more among young men from the middle and lower classes. They represent, among other things, the despair of those who cannot find their place or their future – and this moment in which anti-progressivism becomes anti-feminist or vice versa.
Milei – conservative, sexist – managed to excite them. His politics is anti-politics, which is one of the most popular refuges for politicians, and he has been forming his party with “wounded” people from other parties. When any of them compete in their local elections they hardly get votes; When Milei appears in his district for the national elections, more and more people vote for him – so now he has a chance of winning the presidency. It’s him: his movement is him, and he – always aggressive, paranoid – doesn’t seem in a position to govern anything.
To achieve this he would have to defeat his two adversaries. The closest is Sergio Tomás Massa, who was born in a suburb of Buenos Aires in 1972, son of a small construction businessman and a housewife, both very Italian. He went to a priest’s college and then began to study law and the military on the right. There he stood out: he was solvent, astute, he knew how to talk and smile at the same time, and at 22 years old he was already presiding over the Liberal Youth. But shortly afterward he married the daughter of a Peronist leader and became the same: in the Government of Carlos Menem, a neoliberal Peronist, he combined his two tendencies and obtained his first public positions – and never, since then, has he left them. In that he was consistent; For that he had to be very incoherent: change after change, election after election, defection after defection, he always retained some kind of power. In 2007 he became mayor / mayor / councilor of his wife’s city, Tigre – which is the name of the city, not the lady. In 2008 he was already Cristina Fernández’s Chief of Staff and launched Kirchnerist harangues; In 2015 he stood against her in an election – and denounced her intolerable corruption; In 2019 he joined the Government of Cristina herself and in August 2022, by his order, he was anointed Minister of Finance of a Government and an economy in danger of collapse.
Those who could vote for him to avoid the Great Threat would have to put aside his failure: in his 14 months of economic government, inflation is close to 140%, poverty is 41% and the dollar, Lord of Argentina, went from costing 290 pesos to 1,000 – with the invaluable collaboration of Mr. Milei, who a few days ago came out to recommend the purchase of dollars because “the peso is the currency issued by the Argentine politician and that is why it is worth less than excrement.” Even so, it is not easy to resign oneself to keeping someone in power who has already had it for more than a year with those terrible results: what could he do afterwards that he had not been able to do before? It is also not easy to forget the lack of reliability of a man who has changed his ideas, parties and policies like his underwear –boxer shortsprobably.
The other mutant is Patricia Bullrich Luro Pueyrredón, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1956, daughter of a cardiologist and a well-off woman. Unlike her adversaries, products of the longed-for middle class, Mrs. Bullrich is part of the “Porteño oligarchy”: her ancestor Juan Martín de Pueyrredón governed the country between 1816 and 1819, when it was not even called Argentina, and since then. Bullrich went to a school for rich girls but at 17, influenced by her older sister, she entered the Peronist Youth – which supported the Montoneros. In 1975 she was arrested painting slogans on a wall and she spent six months in prison; After the coup of 1976 she went into exile in Brazil. Upon her return, in 1983, she continued in Peronism and in 1993 she was elected deputy; Seven years later she was Minister of Labor in the failed anti-Peronist government of Fernando de la Rúa. By the mid-2000s she was already a poster child for the right; In 2015, President Macri appointed her as his Minister of Security – and since then she has specialized. Now she has become bukelized: she puts on a warlike face, talks a lot about criminals and prisons, promises to build more and make them more brutal. She has moved so far to the right of it that many find it difficult to vote for her to avoid the Unhinged Menace.
And, furthermore, Bullrich shares with Massa the weight of the past: she presents herself as a champion of the fight against crime but she was already a minister on the subject and produced more police excesses and dubious deaths than effective solutions. Now she wants to recover that profile of a tough woman, willing to do anything but within an order; What she didn’t manage to do was convince anyone that she is articulate, intelligent. Her economic statements, in a country sunk by its economy, are pitiful babblings. The rest is just babbling.
So we Argentines have it screwed: a third want the Lord of the Hairs to win and it is a blow for everyone else, those of us who do not understand how they can want that, those of us who believe that if they want it it is because they have not stopped to listen to it and think about it, those of us who know that the situation is desperate and threatening but that it will not be fixed with desperation and brutal threats. Milei has been playing the worse the better for months, celebrating each price increase as a personal triumph. She knows that many people will vote for him under the motto that “we couldn’t be worse.” The problem with it is that many are realizing that we can: worse, much worse.
But those two-thirds that we fear like hunger do not know what to do, who to vote for, how to oppose that destiny. It is another big difference with Spain or France: we do not have a Sánchez or a Macron, a lesser evil to prevent the worst from keeping everything. The dilemma is tough: will voting for a known bad guy – and so well known – be the way to avoid an unknown bad guy? Few are really convinced. Many, it is assumed, will not even go to vote – in a country where voting is mandatory.
According to all calculations –yes, those that are always wrong–, this Sunday Mr. Milei will get a majority of votes but not enough to win without a second round. Her rival in her is unknown, although many of those conjectures are betting on Massa. There will begin another story: how much fear of disaster will Milei produce? Enough for millions to vote for a catastrophic minister? A country must be very screwed to seek its salvation in those who have sunk it; very screwed up to look for her in a perfect deranged person.
Summary, just in case: Sunday’s elections are decided between an angry man who talks to his dog, a Minister of Economy who is sinking the economy and a former minister who only demonstrated her inefficiency and very little enlightenment. This is Argentine karma, and it is difficult to see any encouraging future. There are those who say that, if anything, a Milei Government could be so disastrous that it might be the “best” option: that it would lead the country to such a disaster that there would be no choice but to shuffle and give it another go in earnest – while the others Only two seem capable of continuing the old, constant, endless fall towards nowhere. The problem is that this milleist disaster would put the lives of thousands, millions, at risk. There would be hunger, deprivation, fighting, the street would catch fire and Milei has already hinted that he might bring out the army to put it down.
Argentine karma in all its splendor: any result this Sunday will be the punishment for these decades of errors, deceptions, betrayals. Milei is, the other two are. Millions of people wonder which will be the mildest, and they do not seem to find, for the moment, an answer. Even less, one would say, a hope.
Sometimes there are overly cited phrases that suddenly seem to find the situation for which they were coined. Antonio Gramsci, who died after many years in fascist prison in 1937, at 46, wrote that “the old world is dying and the new is slow to arrive. In this chiaroscuro monsters are born.”
Subscribe here to newsletter from EL PAÍS América and receive all the key information on current events in the region.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Argentine #karma