True to his custom, the verbose Aníbal Fernández unleashed a strong controversy with the opposition by making a gloomy prognosis: the Minister of Security anticipated that if the opposition wins the next elections there will be “streets covered in blood and deaths” due to an inevitable repression that would accompany a brutal economic adjustment.
The sentence was a response to another sentence that made a lot of noise. Former President Mauricio Macri pointed out to businessmen that a complex campaign is beginning where “every day there are more people who get angry and who believe that everything must be broken.” for which reason he anticipated that whoever reaches the government he must “dynamit, well, semi-dynamit everything, not absolutely everything”.
The framework of both sentences has a lot to do with reading the latest polls in the two main political coalitions and a common denominator: the growth of the ultra-libertarian candidate Javier Milei, who threatens to sneak into a ballot and leave out one of the two majority currents. For this reason, while from Together for Change both Macri and Patricia Bullrich harden the discourse seeking to wink at that electorate jaded by traditional politics and strongly conservative, from the Frente de Todos sector that responds to President Alberto Fernández he would have started a strategy of generating fear in the moderate voter and polarizing with the most “hard” sector of the JxC opposition to match him with Milei.
It is not the first time that Aníbal Fernández has been dispatched with high-sounding and scandalous phrases. In fact, when the president incorporates him into the Cabinet following his resounding defeat in the PASO for the 2021 legislatures, more than his skills as a “multipurpose” official in various Peronist administrations, he weighed his fame as a “media swordsman ”. He is currently the main (and almost lone) defender of the re-election of the president, in the face of the onslaught and criticism of Kirchnerism close to Cristina Fernández, engaging in various controversies not only with the opposition but also with representatives of La Cámpora.
Some of his sayings are baptized with the nickname “anibaladas”, because of how shocking. Among the most famous are “Dr. Carrió does not have her ducklings in a row”, “Insecurity is a sensation”, that Argentina had less poverty than Germany “even if you don’t like it and it is hard for you to accept”, that before leaving their children to María Eugenia Vidal “I leave them to Barreda”, or that Alberto Fernández might not, to his partner Fabiola Yáñez, “take her to the room and hit her with two pineapples because she made a mistake” for the celebration of her birthday in a pandemic, among others.
What is worrying is that his last sentences were not repudiated but were later reinforced by the Chief of Staff Agustín Rossi, who warned that “inflation will spiral” if the opposition wins and unified Macri, Bullrich and Milei with a “fascist culture”. ” that coexists “with the democratic, liberal and anti-Peronist family”. The head of the PJ from Buenos Aires, Máximo Kirchner, joined in, anticipating a scenario similar to 2001 if the leaders “from which they all leave” return, alluding to the crisis that ended the government of Fernando de la Rúa.
Perhaps this commitment to extreme polarization would be more understandable in the final stretch of a hard-fought presidential campaign, but it is staged four months before the primaries and six months before the general ones, before a population that suffers the most important inflationary acceleration in the last 21 years, with poverty levels above 40%, anguished by insecurity and in a state of frustration and fed up with a ruling class engrossed in inmates and short-term ambitions.
In this context, it would be naive to ask for consensus in the Spanish Moncloa Pact style, but the serious crisis demands at least responsible politicians that they think of a minimal approach to seek immediate solutions to urgent problems, and not expose differences through apocalyptic speeches and war metaphors, which only add fuel to social discontent.