• In a conversation we had with the political scientist Andrés Malamud for an interview that will be published in the coming days, he told me about a work by researchers Ezequiel González-Ocantos and Carlos Meléndez on party identities in Argentina. It was in response to the question, precisely, about the intensity of the accessions of the Government of Javier Milei.
  • What do these researchers say? Well, what others have noted before: that among supporters of the Government, as is the case in general, but more so among voters or adherents of libertarianism, identity is essentially negative, intensely negative. That is, they are voted for or supported more because of what they want or wanted to face than because of what they aspired to build.
  • It is a bit of a period climate and the product of a crisis of representation that affects many countries in the world and that results in the emergence of these unprecedented, unexpected, messianic political phenomena and to a certain extent they feel “independent” from any social anchorage, from any tradition and, in that sense, with the “freedom” to do anything.
  • Why do I rescue this aspect of identities? Because it is on that stage that the consequences of the policies act. The results of economic policy especially.
  • Let’s rewind a little: in the legislative election, foreign aid operated and worked, the extortion of Donald Trump, of his minister Bessent on the Argentine electorate with the threat of a market coup if the Government did not win. The slowdown in inflation was also valued (I’m not saying low because it didn’t go down, it went up less), but it was measured in comparison with the previous disaster.
  • The electoral victory generated a certain climate of euphoria in the Government, in the “markets”, especially in the financial sector that Milei and Caputo try to extend until today when they celebrate a return to debt, although even in that area everything is quite precarious because several banks and organizations warn about the lack of accumulation of reserves. While the Government does not want to buy dollars due to the risk of a devaluation that further drives inflation.
  • Perfect. This is what happened in this month and a half. However, at this time the consequences of the economic program are already being felt: a recessionary scenario (regardless of whether it is formally certified or not by Indec), with company closures and suspensions in other very important ones (Whirpool, Mondelez).
  • In this context of a depressed internal market, income that does not reach the majority of people and a contained dollar, we also have growing inflation. Inflation has been rising for at least six months and private consultants say that November continued with that dynamic and December started the same, especially in food.
  • A plummeting internal market, in which even the banks assure that despite the drop in interest rates, credit is not moving because there is no demand from either companies or individuals among whom delinquency rates have increased considerably.
  • Last week we made a comparison between Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism, but let’s go a little closer in time and space: Menem, another mirror in which Milei likes to look at herself.
  • Those of us who live in Argentina under the Menemist “occupation” clearly remember a scenario like the current one, the loss of employment, the industrial crisis, the closures. But all this came after four or five years of economic expansion (and note that I am not saying development or growth), practically frozen inflation and a certain influx of capital that gave possibilities to the economy. The B side was noticed some time later.
  • Now, without the expansion of those years, with only precarious stability and under threat, two months after the electoral victory, the agenda is occupied by the industrial crisis, the closures, the layoffs, the suspensions that add to the adjustment that many people already rejected (in the Garrahan or Disability). That is to say, Milei has everything bad about Menemism without the “good”, and I hope you understand in what sense I mean it.
  • It’s okay, the entire extractive sector that plays an economy of enclaves (oil, mining, soybeans) says it is exultant. They told me about an event organized by the Ministry of Economy in which they were celebrating and encouraged investing in that sector. Now, if that economy does well (and it is not guaranteed at all because look at what is happening in Mendoza, which is not a minor province), the crisis that affects the largest population centers in the country, the suburban areas, will not be resolved. By a simple equation: Milei’s project is for those who generate almost no employment to triumph and the sector of the economy that does to collapse. Unviable, from any point of view.
  • Let’s go back to the beginning, how do you think the news that the lack of income, not making ends meet, the Garrahan quilombo (which they never liked) or the Disability area falls among the popular majorities who had that “negative” adhesion that “they don’t give their lives for Milei”, the news; Now it is added that so-and-so was fired from his job, the other was suspended and he doesn’t know if he is going to come back or what company closed?
  • And that, the Government says, can be solved by making dismissal cheaper, splitting vacations, and ending rest days. That is, gaining rights with the labor reform.
  • Be careful, with this I do not want to deny either the support that the Government is having from the political and union system or the adherence to certain ideas or prejudices that the Government expands and that are the product of a subjectivity produced by years of neoliberalism. I say that there is a material reality underlying all of that that will have its consequences.
  • I listened to the economic historian Pablo Gerchunoff with María O’Donnell and Ernesto Tanenbaum (I started with Malamud, I close with Gerchunoff, I promise to stop quoting liberals for at least two years. Although they are intelligent), and he quoted the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels to talk about this time: “Everything solid vanishes into air.” A principle that governed all previous governments and also applies to Milei.

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    Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com



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