Opinion. Going down is the worst

“- Javier, I have a good one and a bad one. – Tell me the good one. – Almost the entire opposition is still very much in crisis, divided and without a project. – And the bad one? – Now it’s up to us, but there is a century left until 2027 and we have many problems.”

February is like the Sunday of summer. A moment when that season start to finish and you think about pending issues. And going down is the worst. Or, at least, that’s what the government must think. The electoral euphoria of October was proportional to the relief of having released after having seen the abyss very closely. January continued with a financial holiday. But when that emotional rebound passes, many of the problems are still there. And we have to start again another year.

As in Argentina and the world events happen in such a dizzying manner, it is worth remembering the October lessons: a government that did not win on its own merits, but, at least in part, due to fear of the chaos of a new devaluation, inflationary rebound and possible default. The memory of recent crises in Argentina had tipped the balance so that, even in the worst moment of a government plagued by scandals and bad results, an important part of the electorate accepts Donald Trump’s blackmail. The crisis of Peronism contributed the rest.

The electoral result, of course, was not inconsequential. It deepened the crisis of the regime’s opposition parties and gave the government a second life. In the most optimistic versions, the ruling party was left alone in front of the goal, and without a goalkeeper, to win reelection in 2027. In other readings, the government was now left with few excuses and a very long road of almost two years to provide answers to the deepest problems.

The government’s intervention in the INDEC this week seems to confirm that the second of these variants is the most realistic. It is advisable to stop at that point because hits squarely at the heart of politics mileist : with little to offer in the way of improvements in the real lives of the majority, the disinflation It constituted a central core of balances and expectations throughout this time. A revival for many of we are bad but we are doing well from the times of Carlos Saúl Menem, now reverted after the traumatic end of the Front of All with its annual inflation exceeding 200%.

The intervention in the official statistics institute is the confession of a noise at that ultra-sensitive point. Inflation had been increasing for six months in a row. But it is not only a problem of the past but, above all, of the future. The new method to measure inflation that INDEC planned to implement and that the government avoided would have more faithfully reflected what is coming in the coming months: the tariff increases that are planned in public services would have had a stronger impact on the new index, showing in an increasingly stark way the impact of the price increase. Now, however, we will know how much the increase in DVDs impacts our lives, but not the increases in gas, electricity or cell phones. The caste of Freedom Advances He put his hand in and left in force a methodology that is more than 20 years old and that very poorly reflects reality.

Cursedly, the government’s intervention in INDEC coincided with a financial storm that caused a sharp fall in Argentine stocks on Wall Street and a small increase in country risk. Some views attribute it to the crisis caused by the loss of credibility of official statistics, while others focus on the international impact of global turbulence linked to the fear of a bubble in Artificial Intelligence investments and the impact of such developments on other branches of the economy.

In any case, these days once again reminded us how fragile the Argentine economy can be. exposed to external shockcaused either by impacts of this type or by the extreme dependence on a Donald Trump crossed by countless problems in the world and in his own country. The popularity of the Republican president is falling sharply, involved in questions about the actions of his GestapoICE; by strong mobilizations against this authoritarian action; due to problems in the economy; due to complaints about his aggressive foreign policy “without rules”; for the Epstein scandal; and by electoral defeats in the run-up to the decisive midterm elections that will take place in November. These are – for now – facts that should remind Milei that sometimes everything solid can vanish into air. The fate of the Argentine president is largely tied to the fortune of the Republican magnate.

These problems are starkly added to those already being seen in the field of economic activity. The latest reported data show a disparate development in which stagnation prevails (-0.3%), but which looks even worse when zoomed in: financial intermediation, agriculture, oil and mining – that is, finance and extractivism – are growing, but there is a collapse in the manufacturing industry, domestic trade and construction, which are the fundamental branches for generating jobs. It is the famous project to “Peruvianize” the country that has job destruction and company closures the order of the day. In its dispute with Techint, the government wanted to take the opportunity to give a touch of “cultural battle” to its anti-industrial policy (beyond the dark interests of Paolo Rocca). But you don’t live by words.

The resources to reactivate the economy that the ruling party bet on and oversold, until now would not be working. Neither the RIGI, nor trade liberalization, nor Sturzenegger’s deregulations, nor the bets to try to lower country risk and be able to “return to the markets” have so far produced results other than for businesses in specific sectors. With domestic consumption hit by the drop in popular income and the chainsaw of adjustment, activity does not gain dynamism.

The labor reform does not aim to solve that problem either. Far from all the official propaganda, it is a project that does not seek to generate more quality work but rather to precarious, enslave and vote anti-union clauses against those who want to exercise their rights. At this time, the government is trying to finish confirming the votes for the project in the Senate that will be discussed on February 11, although it is keeping strictly secret what changes it proposes with respect to the original version. This is how capitalist “democracy” works. It remains to be seen if they achieve a quorum, what would happen in the votes in particular and what path opens from there to the treatment in Deputies. They are different stations on a long road.

The summer is leaving laboratories on what is coming with the labor reform and how to face it. In Lustramax The illegal Florencia Arietto gang was revealed: its only objective is anti-union, seeking to get rid of the most combative delegates who were at the forefront of achieving better working conditions in recent years. In it GarrahanIn turn, in recent days the direct involvement of the government, through its Chief of Staff Manuel Adorni, was known to try to fire and suspend delegates and activists who were at the forefront of last year’s emblematic struggle, which with their persistence and the support of the population managed to defend the health of children against the cruelty of the chainsaw, winning the Pediatric Emergency Law and a salary increase.

These attacks are not coincidental: they are sectors whose combativeness contrasts with that of the CGT leadership, which has spent the last few months negotiating the labor reform to see if it can lower “some point” while the overall reform passes. This Friday the Board of Directors of the labor union will meet and it will be seen if they announce any forceful measures. However, nothing will alter the central point: even if they announced a day of struggle, it would be part of the strategy of the union leaders who avoid at all costs putting on the streets a strong plan of struggle with continuity to defeat Milei’s plan and the great economic power as a whole.

The same can be said of the disoriented “political Peronism.” Immersed in its own internal affairs after its triple failure (as a government, as an alternative to avoid Milei’s victory in 2023 and now as an opposition), what prevails in that space is dispersion, fragmentation, multiple complicities with the government and a single objective: to think about how to recompose itself towards 2027. The crisis of its narrative, without anything convincing to propose, is eloquent.

Faced with a government that seeks to sustain itself in the crisis of the opposition and in the “cultural battle” looking for enemies to measure (now the Garrahan and the unions), but with nothing to offer in reality, and in the face of a directionless Peronism, there is another bet: that of playing put the working class on its feet as the subject of another solutionsurrounding each fight with support, as in Lustramax or Garrahan, coordinating the sectors that want to go out and fight it -as happened in different parts of the country last weekend- and building volumes of forces to fight to recover the organizations for the struggle and to impose an active national strike and a plan to fight against the slave labor reform that they want to vote for.

The PTS in the Left Front is immersed in that fight with all its forces. During January – and while many bureaucrats took eternal vacations – our party deployed a huge agitation campaign against labor reform not only in the usual places of militancy, but also contributing forces to reinforce large tourist centers such as Mar del Plata or Córdoba, among others, with small planes and millions of posters and flyers. Also, pouring all our energy into the most important fights like Lustramax (and now Garrahan), fighting inside and outside the company, encouraging the fight fund and making contributions, promoting coordination. All this, while deploying a anti-imperialist agitation campaign against Trump’s attack on Venezuela, the threats to Cuba and Iran or supporting the workers and peasants’ struggle in Bolivia.

These are decisive times. In the heat of each of these fights, the bet is to take steps in the construction of a great party of the new working class to defeat Milei, but without getting trapped in the failed recipes of Peronism either. The politics of electoral times, speculation and malmenor have led to this situation. It’s time for a policy of another kind.