2023-12-20 10:30:00
Why does a people, the Argentines, elect a man for the presidency of the country, Javier Milei, who promises to do worse than all those [Cristina Kirchner, 2019-2023] who preceded him to power? To answer this, we must take a detour through the history of the country which, in nearly eighty years, has seen Peronism, military dictatorships and social democracy alternate, accumulating forty years for the first, twenty-four years for the seconds, fourteen years for the third.
Peronism is difficult to summarize. It is a kind of South American Bonapartism, mixing the promise of social justice, economic protectionism, national pride and the incarnation of power in the figure of the leader. Governing over long periods, he structured the Argentine welfare state by placing his cronies in institutions, unions, and local authorities.
Depending on the tendencies that make it up – from the extreme right to the extreme left – he has governed as a social democrat (Nestor Kirchner) or as an ultraliberal (Carlos Menem). In all cases, with clientelism and a level of corruption that sets standards.
Read the analysis: Article reserved for our subscribers Argentina, a country in an impasse due to lack of political vision
The election of Javier Milei, on November 19, is the massive expression (55.65% of the votes) of a rejection of Peronism and its neoliberal avatars, having plunged 40% of the 46 million inhabitants into poverty and destroys income with 143% inflation. Analysis of the vote shows that the 29.99% of votes cast for him in the first round were mainly those of young people, who had not experienced the dictatorship and who were voting for the first time. They are not moved by the revisionist remarks of Javier Milei wanting, for example, to eliminate the pension allocated to the tortured, to give it to their torturers to whom he will release.
Bonus for machismo
Since the return to democracy in 1983, no government has dared to lessen its condemnation of the dictatorship. He wants to stop the work of memory and justice, and reverse the accusations, to the point of privatizing the Naval Mechanics School, where, during the last dictatorship, 5,000 prisoners were tortured and murdered.
There is also the premium on machismo with the announcement of the abolition of the women’s ministry. In the most feminist country in South America! The country that was the first in the world to recognize same-sex marriage. The country where the fight against dictatorship was first the business of the women, mothers and grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. We must also note, in the second round, the decisive support of the neoliberal right of former president Mauricio Macri, who obtained 23.81% of the votes in the first round and without whom Javier Milei would have remained limited to a third of the votes. Some of the voices of social democracy also came to add to the hate speech and thus marked its own death.
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