Last Sunday President Javier Milei (to whom this newspaper would like to extend belated happy birthday greetings after turning 54 last Tuesday, just to establish no malice aforethought here) triggered a tsunami of repudiation when saying that he would dearly like to put the final nail into the coffin of Kirchnerism with ex-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner inside. Yet at much the same time Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof was far more surreptitiously driving his own nail into the coffin of Kirchnerism when tweeting: “The logic between submission and treason is a logic which has entered into crisis, causing bad results,” thus effectively kissing goodbye to two decades of blind loyalty to the Kirchner dynasty and the ex-president’s penchant for “all or nothing” logic.
While verbally aspiring to ending Kirchnerism, Milei is doing much to revive it with his modus operandi, grasping the baton from Kicillof. His onslaught against the press is very much a case in point these days, evident in both tactics and strategy – the tactics taking the form of the President personally picking fights with individual journalists (the Bonellis being the latest example) and the strategy undermining the press as a whole with presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni announcing last Monday that the government has decided to eliminate the exemption from the IVA value-added tax for all media.
The consistency of both tactics and strategy leave much to be desired. Curiously enough for a president aspiring to drive the final nail into the Kirchnerite coffin, Milei almost invariably challenges to his virtual duels journalists who are at least 80-90 percent anti-Kirchnerite with Marcelo Bonelli, the flagship columnist of the Clarín so reviled by Cristina “Clarín miente (Clarín lies)” Kirchner, a prime example. Such targets of the presidential ire might take it as a back-handed compliment that their critiques are at least noticed, an attention presumably not extended to crassly Kirchnerite hacks, and while Milei has a right to answer back to criticism (and even to respond with excessive vehemence if thus being true to type), his inability to absorb even constructive criticism remains deeply worrying, as is his targeting of a family member while on one of his never-ending retweet binges on X.
As for the strategy, Adorni tried to dress the tax torpedo against the press in the purely fiscal logic supposedly underlying all government policies by arguing that elimination of the IVA exemption would contribute almost quarter of a trillion pesos towards a balanced budget (a calculation which a stricken newspaper industry would be sure to dispute). Yet such zeal would seem to be highly selective, given all the tax breaks still granted to the highly protected Tierra del Fuego electronics plants assembling imported components at huge cost to the Argentine consumer (tycoons who both collect and pocket the IVA) or to privileged sectors of the tobacco industry – all adding up to much greater sums than the levies to be gouged from the press. The government would thus seem to think that newspapers are more noxious for the mental health of the population than cigarettes are for the physical.
It may or may not be a coincidence that this new turn of the tax screw against the media will be coming from an overhauled bureau, not only rebranded with ARCA replacing AFIP as its acronym but also streamlined with over a third of current staff being axed by the chainsaw. AFIP chief Florencia Misrahi will also be the ARCA figurehead but with almost half of senior staff being purged (as against a third overall), the potential for shifting revenue collection into very different hands is huge – which does not necessary mean any immediate worries for the favoured few in Tierra del Fuego or elsewhere.
Finally, returning to Kicillof, his challenge of the unconditional subservience hitherto characterising Kirchnerism is but one symptom of the fragmentation which Milei has brought to the political table. While often boasting of his 56 percent run-off vote, Milei can only realistically count on a hard core of the 30 percent from the preceding two rounds with almost half the electorate poised between embracing the libertarian revolution and rejecting its austerity, a basis from which he seems to proceed. With all three of Milei´s predecessors in crisis – Alberto Fernández wholly disgraced while Mauricio Macri and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner are challenged in their respective strongholds of Buenos Aires City and Province between Kicillof and Macri’s mayoral cousin Jorge losing Radical support while opposed by City libertarian legislators more often than not – fragmentation is the name of the game. Still three birthdays to go in this term, Mr President, and three’s a crowd.
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