The indisputable victory of Macrismo at the national level poses an enormous challenge for the forces that promote fairness, democracy and sovereignty in the country. Today, due to the slow and irresistible—“irresistible for now”, like Hugo Chávez once said—ascension of the right, Argentina has become a country that is less fair, less democratic and more dependent. What can we do in the face of such a huge regression? How can we confront this conjure of the local plutocracy, their leaders in Washington and their army of publicists and propellers of efficient “post-truths” who have managed to convince 41.7% of the population to merrily vote for those who have proven to govern for the rich and with the rich, and who are willing to take to the last consequences a sort of euthanasia of the poor, the old, the young and the excluded? To answer this question we first have to assess with precision the strength of the adversary and self-critically acknowledge our weaknesses. Both of these things combined in order to produce this new defeat of the progressivist and-left wing space that has Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as its central figure.

A disproportionate celebration

The right-wing parade has incurred in all sorts of hyperboles to celebrate the victory of macrismo. They called it a “huge”, “historic” victory, “A historic feat!”, one said, “sweeping”—“an out of this world leader”, said one of the main political consultants (1). Then what do we call Raúl Alfonsín’s victory in 1983 when he defeated peronismo for the first time in its history? Or, more recently, the 54% obtained by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in 2011? Obviously, the right is overflowing with optimism. However, analysts shouldn’t get carried away by these excesses, which were also present in Cristina Fernández’s bunker in Sarandí. If we analyze the results in a calm manner, we see that the numbers obtained by Cambiemos are practically identical to the ones that Néstor Kirchner sieged in his first Parliamentary election after arriving in the Pink House: 41.7% for Macri in 2017, 41.6% for Kirchner in 2005. Both are below Raúl Alfonsín’s numbers in 1985, when he obtained 42.3% of the vote. Neither the 1985 nor the 2005 victories were announced with the grandiloquence that reigns these days. In synthesis: it was a very good election for macrismo, but far from being an unprecedented triumph in Argentine politics.

It goes without saying that the considerations made above are not intended to diminish the merits of the adversary but to weigh them precisely. Underestimation leads inexorably to defeat, as proven by the reckless naiveté displayed by Kirchnerismo when it “chose” to make a rival out of Mauricio Macri, who was then governor of the City of Buenos Aires, and seemed easy to defeat—even by a candidate like Daniel Scioli. They dismissed and ridiculed him for years, turning a deaf ear to whose of us who warned of the danger, until the bitter awakening of November 2015 (2), and even to the surprise his own people, the rival that nobody betted upon ended up in the Pink House.

In line with this attitude, we need to acknowledge that Cambiemos triumphed in 13 districts: Buenos Aires, the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Corrientes, Chaco, Entre Ríos, Jujuy, La Rioja, Mendoza, Neuquén, Salta, Santa Cruz, and Santa Fe, while the Justicialist Party (in its multiple variants, some closer to Macri than to Cristina) obtained victory in 11, including their bastion Tierra del Fuego and, by a handful of votes, La Pampa, another stronghold of peronismo. Macrismo increased its representations in both the Chamber of Deputies and Senators of the Nation, and although it doesn’t have quorum in either one, the irresistible attraction of the Pink House’s checkbook and the volubility of the political sectors and leaders who are presenting themselves as the “opposition” are signs that indicate that probably on December 10 (3) Macri will have better chances to pass the legislation he needs to implement the second—and more radical—phase of the adjustment. Additionally, nowadays Cambiemos is the only force that has nation-wide presence and that has triumphed in the five districts (Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Province of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Santa Fe and Mendoza) where 70% of the electorate lives. A great victory, no doubt, but not unprecedented in the history of our democracy and not worthy of the calificative of “historic feat”. The cases of Raúl Alfonsín and Carlos Menem prove the contrary.

In an article published by Revista Anfibia, Alejandro Grimson points out three factors that explain Macri’s victory. The first is the mobilizing efficacy of Cambiemos’ narrative, which bombarded the population day and night for almost two years thanks to the formidable, novel and profoundly anti-democratic oligopoly of the press, radio and TV that permanently feeds Argentina the official line. On fundamental issues, the two main newspapers of the country are as different from each other as the Pravda and the Izvestia were in the the extinct Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the exegetes of the right continue to claim that “before”—that is, during the government of Cristina Fernández—freedom of press was under attack. The message transmitted by their media oligopoly is clear: “Kirchnerismo is the past, and it was a perverse combination of incompetence and corruption that created a false illusion of prosperity that proved to be unsustainable. The country has survived that nightmare and now must make, with hopeful resignation, the necessary sacrifices to go back to normalcy”. The endless repetition of this message, which is drilled day and night into the brains of Argentinians, plus the systematic repression of dissident voices by the self-proclaimed guardians of the Republic—like the elimination of Telesur from cable TV, purges in the National Radio, threats against private stations to silence uncomfortable voices, the arbitrary use of government-paid advertising to favor certain media—, the infamous downfall of the media apparatus of Kirchnerism, and the opportune judicial cases opened against high-ranking members of the previous government installed anti-Kirchnerista sentiment which is shared by a big portion of the country. This creates a tragicomic situation when, confronted with the facts that wages are deteriorating day by day, unemployment grows uncontainably and the country is taking exorbitant amounts of debt, the standard response of many average citizens is something in the line of: “yes, but they stole everything”. In other words, the illusion of a better future and the demonization of the past was skillfully inoculated in the population by a multitude of unscrupulous marketing specialists hired by the even more unscrupulous leaders of the right.

The fact that Mauricio Macri’s cabinet has a higher number of prosecuted officials than Cristina Fernández’ hasn’t had an impact on common sense. Nor the fact that Mauricio Macri took office while he was being prosecuted, nor that he’s involved in the dirty businesses unveiled by the Panama Papers (which caused the Prime Minister of Iceland to resign), along with other members of the Cambiemos coalition like Claudio Avruj, Esteban Bullrich, Gustavo Arribas and his cousin Jorge Macri.

The so-called “independent” press meticulously filed the issue away and the news was never examined in depth by the public opinion. The same thing happened with the president’s scandalous move to condone a debt taken by his own father, Franco Macri, while he was the director of the Argentine Postal Office—a decision which finally had to be reverted and submitted to justice in the midst of a scandal which, however, had no political consequences. It also didn’t matter that a social leader, Milagro Sala, was sent to prison and detained for almost two years without a sentence, even though the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a precautionary measure on the matter and several UN committees demanded her immediate release. The case of the forced disappearance of Santiago Maldonado by Gendarmerie officers was only the last link in a long chain of lies, cover-ups and premeditated misinformation. A process where the perversity of one of the “star candidates” of macrismo, Elisa Carrió, made all sorts of faux-pases (“there’s a 20% possibility that he’s in Chile”, “he’s frozen like Walt Disney”, etc), which not only show the hidden side of her supposedly republican and humanitarian convictions and her desire to be a protagonist in the media but also the regrettable loss of culture of the capital’s citizens—which historically had been the vanguard of the process of justice for the crimes committed in the 70s dictatorship and now awarded her 51% of the vote.

To this we must add another two factors: on one side, the aforementioned media concentration prevented a critical analysis of the macrista discourse for the benefit of a greater audience. Few times before in our history was there such a high level of “media unanimity” as the one that is currently asphyxiating Argentina. This is a terrible innovation in our political life, but we must remember that always—not only here but anywhere in the world—the political left-wing and progressivist forces had to fight against enemies that were entrenched in the media, and often they have obtained victory. And secondly, the high degree of fragmentation of the opposition, and especially the division of peronismo into multiple political organizations built on the weak ground of diverse provincial or local leaderships, prevented an efficient strategy against the right. Obviously, this sends us back to the crucial question about the nature of peronismo today. Is it synonymous of Cristina Fernández, as the recent senatorial campaign affirmed? Or is it her plus others, such as: Gioja, Insfrán, Pichetto, Verna and Rodríguez Saá, along with the defeated Urtubey, Massa, Randazzo, Menem, Alicia Kirchner, Schiaretti and De la Sota. Can this heterogeneous group converge in a common project? So far they couldn’t, and this dispersion benefitted the government. Probably, many of these politicians are already negotiating with the national government in order to ensure “governability” over the next two years in exchange for a comfortable place in the national budget in the new times ahead.

 

1. Source
2. Date of the victory of Mauricio Macri in the presidential elections
3. Date on which the new officials will take their seats

---