On occasion, politics can be rather more than just a game played by ambitious men and women who like nothing better than sticking a knife in a rival’s back. Javier Milei may have thoroughly deserved the electoral drubbing he was given last Sunday by the voters of Buenos Aires Province, a grotesquely oversized jurisdiction, but the same cannot be said about his attempt to reshape Argentina’s economy and make it productive enough to provide more of her inhabitants with a decent livelihood.
That remains a thoroughly worthwhile objective. However, if enough people come to the conclusion that, because austerity is painful for many, it would be better to leave things more or less as they were before Milei – accompanied by cohorts of chancers, some every bit as foul-mouthed as he is, came prancing onto the scene – there would be little to stop Argentina from degenerating into yet another poverty-stricken and crime-ridden failed state.
Argentina is far from being the only democratic country in which the authorities are finding it desperately hard to keep public spending in check without greatly annoying large chunks of the electorate. Much the same is now happening in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and most of their European neighbours where even relatively new governments are being accused of depriving honest folk of what is theirs by right. Perhaps the situation facing them would be different if a large majority agreed that fiscal discipline was necessary and that in the long term it would benefit everybody.
For a brief moment, it looked as though most Argentines had mutated into fiscal hawks and would be happy to reward Milei for making them suffer. But a week ago, many voted against him for what were straightforward economic reasons, while almost as many others stayed at home because they felt offended by his uncouth behaviour and suspected that his sister Karina was taking bribes from pharmaceutical companies. Whether true or not, there can be little doubt that such allegations did serious harm to a president who less than two years earlier had been elected not just because the economy was in free fall but also because it was widely assumed that, unlike so many members of the then outgoing administration, he would refrain from trying to enrich himself at the taxpayers’ expense.
Milei is determined to keep Karina on board, but there is nothing he can do to prevent his foes from taking pot shots at her. They know that, as well as being the most powerful member of the ruling team, with the possible exception of her brother, she is also by far the most vulnerable. It may be unfair to mock her for having been until very recently a pastry-cook and fortune-teller who used tarot cards to predict what was in store for her clients, but there can be little doubt that putting her in charge of the government’s political strategy was extremely foolish.
To make matters worse, Karina seems to be incapable of defending herself convincingly in public or of confronting parliamentary committees that could bombard her with difficult questions. No matter how important the therapeutic role she plays by calming down Javier whenever he flies off the handle may be, she is the government’s biggest liability. For the Peronists she is a sitting duck and they will continue to attack her remorselessly, encouraging football fans to make fun of her by chanting abusive slogans about “Mrs Three Percent,” the cut she supposedly receives from the funds donated by appreciative businessmen in exchange for government favours.
It may well be that most Argentine politicians realise that, unless the country reconciles itself with liberal capitalism and becomes genuinely “competitive” in an uncharitable world in which losers get trampled on, its future will be grim indeed. It should therefore have been quite easy for Milei to build a coalition broad enough to lead the population through the trying months that lie ahead. But instead of making an effort to reach what would have had to be a power-sharing arrangement with the many who thought that, despite all that fantasy stuff about heavenly hosts, the “libertarian” was on the right track, egged on by Karina he decided to go it alone and kidded himself that, apart from a handful of ape-like degenerates, the citizenry would not hesitate to accompany him on the march towards the promised land.
Milei reacted to the bad news he received last Sunday evening by repeating something Winston Churchill allegedly once said about success being fleeting and failure not fatal, but what counts is the courage needed to persist. Though the sentiment thus expressed is clearly Churchillian, it would appear that he never put it quite that way. Perhaps Milei vaguely remembers Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem ‘If,’ in which he treats “triumph and disaster” as “two imposters” to be brushed off. Be that as it may, he could find another verse by Kipling more relevant. After the British Empire’s humiliating performance in the Boer War he wrote; “Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,/We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.”
Will it? If Milei refuses to make some radical changes, Argentina could soon be plunged into political turmoil. Though those who want to restore the corrupt and mendacious old regime that was turning her into a basket case may be in a minority, there are enough of them to make it impossible for anyone from outside their ranks to govern the country. This is something that, over the years, Peronists have been very good at. By exploiting the understandable grievances of the people they themselves have impoverished, they have long remained in charge of the most dilapidated districts of Greater Buenos Aires which, irrational as it may seem, supply them with plenty of votes when election time comes round.
If people in other parts of the province take the trouble to go to the polling booths they will not guarantee victory, but if – as happened last week – many decline to do so, those who for their own reasons want Argentina to return to what for them is “normality” will carry the day.
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