Is it the end? Worry not, we have been here before. In fact, if you sense dèjá vu, it is because it is now the zillionth time around! Unless something very unusual happens, Argentina is again on its way to opening the Pandora’s box of political disaster.
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina for the average Argentine, seems doomed to failure. And failure in Argentina is not available in any small dose. Failure comes every once in a while and means death by OD. For those from my generation, the movie ends with no new plot.
If you had come to these pampas in search for political excitement and had until not been let down by the quiet, pocket-filled years of the husband president Néstor Kirchner, your time has now come. Argentina has taken the speedway that goes from silence to self-destruction… mostly overnight.
The Cristina administration’s clash with the farmers – from now on ‘the rich’ – is not just about taxes. It is about who will be to blame for everything that is still wrong and is likely to go wrong in Argentina in the near future. All of a sudden, the public’s abundance-driven silence has become a guttural grunt that, slowly but surely, begins to blame the first-elected female president for every evil tormenting this land. In no less than 100 days, notions have become reality that:
1) Cristina is not in control: there is a dual command in Argentina with husband Kirchner in the starring role.
2) Cristina is frivolous. The president’s stylish wardrobe plus taste for fancy hairdo and expensive accessories do no go down well on certain voting groups – most especially the female masses. ‘That bitch’, you’ll hear in the streets more and more.
3) Cristina is arrogant. Typical case when virtue becomes fault. The president is an impressive public speaker, and does speak some truths. But a lecturing ‘I am always right’ tone is going to come boomeranging back to her sooner rather than later.
So suddenly the rich, who also happen to have the beef Argentines eat and the soy Argentines sell, are angry because they have to pay more taxes, taxes which, by the way, are at the heart of the government’s ‘power-building via cash handouts’ strategy.
The wife president, as the husband president had done for some time, plays Robin Hood and says the rich have to pay so that the poor get food. But the rich take none of that anymore and go macho on the roads, and they withhold the food. Suddenly there are no asados for two consecutive weekends. And Argentines like their asados. And when you expect the hoi polloi to again come to Robin Hood’s rescue, instead – and for reasons unknown – they grab their saucepans and bang them in protest to demand the female president’s head. (Note: banging pots, silly as it may sound, was the symbol of Argentina’s 2001 economic, political and social meltdown.)
Cristina may end up winning one or two of the battles in front of her, even the one against the so-called rich farmers. But she is hardly likely to win the war for her administration unless she gains control of something she is not even close to having so far: the public agenda. Starting from day two since she took office in December, when an international scandal of major proportions involving the US, Venezuela and a suitcase filled with cash blew up in her face, she has been cleaning up somebody else’s messes (most of them her former president husband’s). While it is true Cristina’s government is not seen as anything new but a mere continuation of Néstor – and that may be what Argentines massively voted for after all – she has so far failed to introduce anything close to her own plans for her presidency.
The history of Argentina’s young democracy shows there is no happy ending possible once the popularity threshold has been broken downwards. And then tragedy (at least in the banana republic format) is hardly avoidable. Argentines can only hope history will be wrong for once.
Looks like this “Robin Hood” movie would be a great movie to watch just like the movie about King Arthur.,”;