2023-05-28 08:38:00
The barricade of the 25th favored the Minister of the Interior more than the rest, because on the subject of the traitor and the hero he is the one who most pleases the identity claim of the vice president.
Skilled like few others at biting, Umberto Eco made a character in his novels say that Parisians, for at least a century, have liked to build barricades. That they then collapse before the first cannon shot is something that does not seem to count for much: the barricades are made to feel like heroes.
Cristina Kirchner set up her last barricade, under a May rain and with a designer box, to stage a new farewell, once more with her back to the Casa Rosada. An anguished crowd asked her in increasingly subdued voices that she be a candidate once more, that she stop insisting on being banned and that she return to the seat of power in Argentina. Although as vice president she truly embraces that power and as a candidate she might try to retain it, Cristina Kirchner continues to choose to evade that commitment. All her political energy has been focused on dramatizing the theme of the traitor and the hero. Alberto Fernández must be seen as the ideological defector. Herself, in vibrant retreat, like the heroic victim of betrayal.
The option of dramatizing the irreversible break with the President was a symbolic imperative that the vice president might not avoid: the last service to the Kirchner cause that Alberto Fernández can provide is to carry, in the tired and exclusive solitude of his back, the cross of failure of Cristina’s economic and political model. If he fulfills that task, the vice presumes, he will save the rest of his political space from the monumental cost of a historic failure. The abandoned image of the President leaves an allegorical loophole to say that what failed was not Cristina Kirchner’s model, but the crippled and heretical way in which Alberto Fernández applied it.
The vice president has already admitted that two thirds of the electorate are willing to punish the government for unlimited inflation. Her followers ask her to present herself as a trump card. She tries to persuade them that it is better to order a retreat; that the only chance to win would be a carambola in which a withdrawal strategy is miraculously combined with the division of the adversaries.
The first decision that this strategy implies is to hit a candidate to lose. He has three options: Axel Kicillof is the one who would best retain his own third, but playing him for the presidency might unguard the withdrawal in the Buenos Aires trench. Sergio Massa generously offers himself for the expiatory sacrifice, but if by chance he were to benefit from the martingale, the first thing he would do would be to bury Cristina. Eduardo de Pedro has no votes, the vice should try a transfusion with high risk; only then would he retain symbolic capital.
The barricade of the 25th favored the Minister of the Interior more than the rest, because on the subject of the traitor and the hero he is the one who most pleases the identity claim of the vice president.
Why is Massa still confident in his chances of competing and winning? Because he reads in the polls something different than Kirchnerism.
Why is Massa still confident in his chances of competing and winning? Because it reads something different from Kirchnerism in the polls: it interprets that the resilient third of the ruling party is not an ideological bloc convinced of Cristina’s dogmas, but a segment of voters that opposes the return of any non-Peronist political variant.
All that reverie of Massa dispenses with a central fact: he is the minister of inflation. Cristina’s pragmatism resides in this simple verification: who will want to vote for the candidate of the remarking of prices and the destruction of real wages? The testimonial option, in this line of reasoning, is not an ideological whim, but a flight of first necessity.
If the focus is enlarged, the image of the despised and spiteful President is seen from above; of the vice rushed to hide his departure by accentuating the ideological bias of his political space; of the Minister of Economy hallucinating candidacies while inflation catches fire; of the government corporations introverted in the redefinition of their lobby objectives. A box prepared to hide the government that actually turned its back on the entire population.
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