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Macri published a letter on his social networks entitled “Have we learned the lesson?”
The ex-president Mauricio Macri he used his social networks once more to criticize the national government repeating its preferred strategy: denial and lack of self-criticism. In a letter titled “Have we learned our lesson?” saddled the lack of energy caused, among other factors, by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, to the “cfour Kirchnerist governments” and their “populist” policies.
According to the former president, in the country “there is a lack of energy. There is a lack of diesel. The truckers cannot get the fuel to take the harvest to the port and they have to queue for miles.” At “this rate,” he predicted, “in the winter there will be a lack of gas” and “if this happens, industries and factories throughout the country will have to reduce or stop their production and eventually they will have to advance vacations or suspend their workers,” he said, without any mention of SMEs and companies that closed during his government due to the impossibility of facing the high gas and electricity rates.
“It is also possible that there will be a lack of CNG and it will affect transportation. The ships that bring diesel have to be put on hold because we don’t have deposits to store it, nor do we have adequate trains or routes to transport it,” he added. This “dramatic lack of energy”according to Macri, It had nothing to do with the energy policy that he promoted during his administration or with the crisis that is being experienced worldwide due to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but “it is the direct consequence of the four Kirchner governments.
His interpretation is curious, considering that one of the most questioned policies and the one that caused the greatest suffering during his government was, precisely, energy: between 2016 and 2019 almost three million families fell into the poor condition in their possibilities of energy consumption. Altogether, they were 2,939.00 households that might not resist the tariffs of the Macri government. In 2020, instead, the number of households in energy poverty fell to 1.2 millionwith which 1.8 million overcame that situation.
Macri’s rate hike was basically a transfer of resources from consumers to utility companies, not an update of values in line with inflation. According to a report from the University of La Plata Observatory, there was a “phenomenal asymmetry between the evolution of family income and the income of companies in the energy sector: while family income between December 2015 and December 2020 multiplied on average by 5.14 times, the gross income of electricity and gas distributors did so by 21 and 10.4 timesrespectively, taking a weighted average”.
Nor did he mention the day in which electricity was cut throughout the country and some regions of neighboring countries.
In his letter, Macri assured that “what is happening and what will happen is the result of populism in action“.
In this context, he listed what in his opinion are “ideologized policies of the Kirchner government of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Kirchner” that “made renewable energy projects stop” and asked: “Are we going to learn something this time, or are we going to forget And will we continue to go around in a downward spiral year following year, getting lower, deeper, worse?” he asked. Apparently he has no intention of asking himself that question.
