If verbal violence really does breed the physical variety, as so many serious people insist is the case, Argentina is about to suffer a repeat of what happened 50 or so years ago, when hardly a day went by without someone being gunned down for what presumably were ideological motives. Since then, the country has been remarkably peaceful, far more so than the United States or France, but if what is being said by politicians and their activist friends is anything to go by, the long truce could be nearing its end. As in many other parts of the world, such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and much of continental Europe, Argentine public discourse has recently taken an ugly turn. Is it simply that people are letting off steam and would never dream of actually doing anything nasty? We should soon know the answer to that particular question.
Thanks in large measure to President Javier Milei’s taste for hyperbolic epithets, he and his supporters have been doing their best to drive those who do not share their opinions up the wall by equating them with animals that have an image problem and insinuating that they favour unorthodox sexual practices. Though the Kirchnerites – like their friends in Venezuela and Cuba – have long done much the same, in comparison with Milei’s libertarians they now come across as mild-mannered folk who treat their enemies with proper respect, but that could prove to be an illusion. Milei apparently thinks so.
In an interview with Louis Sarkozy, the son of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy (who, like Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has to wear an electronic anklet after being sentenced to house arrest on corruption charges), Milei said that the Kirchnerites would stop at nothing in their efforts to wreck his economic programme and could even try to assassinate him. In the light of Milei’s Trumpian penchant for exaggerating the significance of just about everything that involves him, a certain degree of scepticism is clearly called for. But given the circumstances, the risk he alluded to could be rather more than yet another figment of his overheated imagination. Out there in what Peronist heavies say is their own territory, in which the president should not be allowed to campaign, there is no shortage of politically-minded thugs who would be happy to strike a blow against a man who makes no secret of his desire to bury the movement they belong to and has already deprived them of much of the political clout they think is theirs by right.
Milei is not the only person who is convinced that, without him, the economic programme he has put into effect would come crashing down to the ground. Many would agree. It is frequently pointed out that the country’s political system is “hyper-presidential” – in which the man or woman in the Pink House wields monarchical powers – so there can be little doubt that were Milei to fall, the consequences would be momentous. This is something that the Kirchnerites are fully aware of, but that does not mean that they would benefit from the hypothetical elimination of the man currently at the top; no matter how it came about, many would blame them for whatever happened.
In any event, if Milei attached more importance to what he is trying to do than to his own role in it, he would be doing his level best to make sure it enjoyed the support of a far wider range of politicians that is provided by card-carrying members of La Libertad Avanza, the party he and his sister Karina stitched together when it became clear that millions would vote for him in the presidential elections.
Milei could easily have done so; he was elected because much of the country had come to the conclusion that not just Kirchnerism but Peronism as a whole had been a disastrous failure and something very different, with someone tough in charge, had to be tried. Had it not been for the overweening ambition of Karina Milei, on winning office he would probably have teamed up with Mauricio Macri’s PRO party, most Radical factions and others to form a broad-based coalition capable of giving the country the government it so desperately needed to get itself out of the deep hole into which it stumbled. Instead, the ruling couple decided to go it alone and proceeded to quarrel with their would-be allies. Among other things, this meant that far too much would depend on their own personal fate.
For the government, the last few weeks have been unsettling, what with Congress getting uppity, the economy refusing to expand at as brisk as pace as had been confidently predicted and rumours about Karina’s role in an illegal fundraising operation persuading many that she and her aides are every bit as corrupt as are members of the Kirchner family. And, as the recent elections in Corrientes Province made evident, the reluctance of Karina to allow members of the makeshift and decidedly unimpressive party she improvised to ally themselves with outsiders would cost it plenty of much-needed votes. We shall soon know whether or not something similar will happen in Sunday’s Buenos Aires Province elections and the national ones that are scheduled for October 26, but for Milei the outlook now seems less promising than it did barely a month earlier.
Milei often reminds people that he feels contempt not just for most flesh-and-blood politicians but also for politics as such, a trait he shares with many foes of democracy, which was why he decided to leave his sister in charge of all his party’s affairs so he could busy himself redesigning the national economy. For a while, that arrangement seemed to work well enough, but then Karina’s highhandedness led to fierce infighting among members of the government that drew attention to its many deficiencies.
Much is made of Milei’s emotional dependence on his sister. She seems to have made him her prisoner. If those who say he cannot sideline her without putting his own mental health in danger are right, Argentina is in deep trouble, but perhaps she cares enough for her brother to realise that the best way for her to help him would be for her to stop trying to run the country on his behalf. This would be a difficult task even for a supremely talented politician, let alone for an inexperienced neophyte like herself.
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