A disturbing discussion regarding the country’s economic situation has been activated. The national board of Together for Change issued a document and the response from the authorities was immediate.
The problem is that each of the two coalitions described a panorama diametrically opposed to the one presented by the other, modifying several of the parameters used by the opposing faction, in such a way that it is very difficult for the average citizen to weigh the arguments of each one.
In summary, the opposition coalition expressed its “concern over the serious economic situation that the national government will leave to the next government.” They highlighted a “record indebtedness” so far in the Alberto Fernández administration, which they estimated at “the equivalent of 83 billion dollars.”
“Despite the government’s denial,” they concluded, “this has placed the country in a delicate scenario of financial fragility that raises the risk of a chaotic exit,” which they metaphorized with the word “bomb”: the economy might explode at any time, be it during this administration or during the next one.
The Secretary of Economic Planning, Gabriel Rubinstein, was in charge of responding. Since the opposition described a debt in dollars, it chose to refloat the Kirchnerist thesis of deleveraging in that currency, appealing to the restructuring of the external debt and a new agreement with the Paris Club, in addition to emphasizing that currently “the market Debt in pesos constitutes the Treasury’s main source of financing.
Regarding this debt, he affirmed that “it is manageable and sustainable”, because “half is in the hands of the national State itself” and because, if it is compared with that of Colombia and Brazil, it is noted that it represents a quarter of our internal product gross, while in those other countries the same relationship is much higher.
Let’s agree that each coalition has the right to address the electorate in the way it prefers. Of course, as we said a few weeks ago, when politics opts for nonsense to confuse the public, it goes once morest itself and delegitimizes itself in the worst way.
Together for Change can understand that Mauricio Macri was wrong by not being honest regarding the state in which he found the public accounts when he took office, and consequently feeling the need to now present a crude diagnosis of the current economic imbalance.
The Frente de Todos can continue to defend the story of the successful program and bet on discrediting the opposition, even if to do so it distorts certain data from the recent past and proposes fallacious comparisons.
What both sectors should forbid themselves is playing destabilization to twist an electoral campaign, as happened on other occasions. Warning regarding a near apocalypse is as harmful as maintaining that the economy is moving in the right direction and that its main variables are under control.
What the country needs, on the contrary, is for both sectors to agree on a realistic diagnosis of the economic problems and jointly design a global stabilization plan.
