Peronism for the English Speaker
Understanding Argentina's megalomaniac leaders
Peronism for the English Speaker
Main political tenets (or lack thereof)
Peronism is not a political party. It is a movement that follows the ideas of Juan D. Perón. Perón is the most divisive Argentine in history, and he is not part of this work. He died in 1974 and millions saluted him during his funeral procession along Avenida de Mayo. Peronism went on and evolved since then, taking all kinds of colours and shapes. It does not have a defined set of principles and values and thus, performed differently in each of its several manifestations. From a labour socialist movement in its origins to a neoliberal party during the 90s to its current Chavist, anti-republican variant.
Behind Peronism’s multi-personality disorder, there is a very South American element: we pay more attention to leaders than to their political parties, ideas or background. We love “isms”. We Argentines have “Macrism”, “Kirchernism”, “Radicalism”, “Albertism”… whichever person gives us what we think we want (regardless of his or her philosophy on how to get it), we will sit him on Rivadavia’s chair. We adore the strong leader that provides. We don’t care if it then wants to stay as president forever, or if he has been prosecuted for crimes against the state. We are populist in a basic, childish way, and we rarely ask ourselves what we need in the long run.
Yes, naturally, many bad things can be said about our decadent social integrity and education system (and the kind of people both are producing) but the truth is that our history is quite short. We are barely 200 years old, we don’t have much to work with. We are quite Catholic though, and that gives us some understanding of western morals. But other than that, we are quite capricious with our politics and our economy. During the 90’s we wanted to be liberal. In the 40’s/50’s we wanted to be socialists and defend the workers' rights and be progressive. For the last 20 years we chose to be Chavists.
Peronism has always understood our volatile and sometimes even bipolar nature. And it changes to win. It doesn’t adapt, as that would imply that there is at least a core principle which is perennial and non-negotiable. On the contrary, it is an empty shell that wins elections. What does the shell contain? Liberalism, socialism, chavism… whatever idea the Peronist strongman of the moment thinks will win him elections. And thus, it became the party of those obsessed with power. The perfect disguise to mislead voters into supporting corrupt politicians.
Despite this primary ideological ambiguity, Peronism’s latest version, has consistently shown two very clear traits: a complete disregard for fiscal policy and corruption. Technical acumen and experience are needed to keep up appearances but they are not essential. Blind obedience and loyalty are the main qualifications that every Peronist leader expects from its ministers and secretaries. They must be, if your leadership is solely centred on public spending, corruption and power. Good policy? It doesn’t matter. A political manifesto or a set of principles? They are not needed.
To justify the predictable but disastrous results that such a style of leadership generates, Peronist leaders have become experts in excusing themselves for performing poorly. Testament to this is how many times it has won elections, regardless of how poor Argentina has become in the last 40 years. Corruption and populism are expensive. No Central Bank, no National Treasury and no government can survive when the latter consistently spends more money than it can collect via tax. Inflation starts to bite, debt skyrockets, Central Bank reserves dwindle and the inevitable crisis ensues.
To be fair with Peronism, though, no political party seems to know what fiscal responsibility means in Argentina. The military spent too much, radicals spent too much, Macri’s government spent too much… After all these years, this feature speaks more about the core of the Argentine culture than about its political class. But with Peronism, it is a matter of magnitude. Public spending is used by this party as the main tool to gain political power, especially in low-income sectors via benefits. Other parties are guilty of the same sin but have learnt to rely on other less monetary means as well.
History of 21st Century Peronism
Since 1983, the year in which free elections returned to Argentina the country has faced two huge crises. First, in 1989-1990 Argentina was shaken by hyperinflation: 3079%. Then, ten years later, the country suffered the 2001 Crisis, a series of economic, political and social events that resulted in 39 deaths and which included a parade of 5 different presidents taking office in two weeks. In Q1 2002 the GDP collapsed 16,3%.
Between 2002 and 2003 politicians were forced to clean house. After 10 years of artificially simulating that 1 peso equalled 1 dollar, a Peronist government led by Eduardo Duhalde (but supported by most of the political parties) took the reins, did away with that fiction and attempted to tidy up the country’s economy.
After the 2001 Crisis though, the Argentine people were full of apathy, nihilism and resentment. They stopped believing in their institutions and their politicians. No social cohesion was left, and all these factors sent the society back at least 140 years, to the time of “caudillos” and charismatic leaders. And if there is a political party that specialises in producing charismatic leaders, that’s Peronism. For the 2003 elections, Duhalde had done a decent job in fixing the economy, but Carlos Menem (the inventor of the 1 peso 1 dollar artificial parity) was still lurking and had significant support. Duhalde’s image was poor, to the point that he needed to bring forward the election date. Moreover, he ended up needing a different candidate to stop his predecessor from returning to power. Enter Nestor Kirchner.
Kirchner understood national politics very quickly. He was the governor of the Santa Cruz province, a Caudillo and everything there went through him, his family and his friends. When Duhalde picked him as his successor to compete with Menem in 2003, he thought he would be able to control Kirchner. But, after winning the elections, Kirchner surprisingly leaned heavily towards the left, profiting from its higher moral ground, opposing the Peronist right, its corruption and its neoliberalism. Also, this new leftist version of Peronism (aptly called “Kirchnerism”), allowed Kirchner to bond with the Human Rights Organisations, and to use this relationship as a political shield. “The left gives you legal immunity”, he used to say.
The economy was recovering fast. The commodities prices had skyrocketed and Kirchner kept Duhalde’s economic team at the helm. From 2003 to 2008, Argentina’s GDP rose at “Chinese rates”. But by 2005 signs of an overheated economy started to worry the establishment. Eventually, the cabinet also started to worry, but Kirchner wanted to know nothing about this and Duhalde’s "clean up" team was replaced. The press also started to pick up inconsistencies between the private consultants’ numbers and the official government numbers. Something was wrong. Inflation was coming back, and everyone could see it in the supermarket prices. Why were the government statistics not showing this? The Peronist government was tampering with the inflation numbers and voters were upset. By 2007, Nestor Kirchner could not run for president without risking a loss. So he took a page out of the Peronist History book: he brought in the wife.
Cristina and Nestor Kirchner were not the first power couple in Peronism. Perón and Evita are the most famous but Isabel, his third wife, shared the ballot with him as his vice-president in ‘73. She succeeded him after he died, less than a year after winning the elections. So, when Kirchner decided to promote his wife as his candidate no one was surprised. That did not mean that things were going to be easy for her, though. Inflation, albeit denied by the government, was rising slowly but steadily. On top of this, two weeks after winning the elections, the Venezuelan Guido Antonini Wilson was caught with a bag full of cash flying to Buenos Aires from Caracas. He came accompanied by several Argentine public officials, in what was the first of a long list of corruption scandals that shook Cristina Kirchner’s government.
The fiscal deficit was back too. To cover it, governments have three options: they can get a loan, print money or increase taxes. The Kirchner couple did all three: they got loans from Venezuela (at a ridiculous rate) they created new taxes and increased old ones and they printed pesos compulsively. Argentines have a lot of experience in dealing with inflation and they started closing their dollars savings accounts. This resulted in two problems for the government: a shortage of dollars and inflation.
To deal with inflation the government cooked the official stats and persecuted any private consultant who dared to publish what the real inflation rate was. It also tried to tax the farmers, the most dynamic and productive sector in the country. It failed dramatically. By 2010 things were not looking good for Cristina ahead of the 2011 elections. Then something unexpected happened.
On October 27, 2010 Nestor Kirchner died. With him out of the picture and turned into a martyr, Cristina saw her image soar and she easily won the 2011 elections. She won with 54% of the votes. She had enough authority to impose a currency clamp (“cepo cambiario”) on the dollar, thus creating a black market similar to the one existing in Venezuela. Since then, Argentina became a de facto “bimonetary” economy.
By now, all numbers published by the government lacked any credibility. Companies used private consultants and newspapers to follow the dollar price and the real inflation rate. Cristina Kirchner struggled to maintain a narrative which was simply too detached from reality, even by Argentine standards. First, she persecuted companies and consultants. Then she turned to the media. She tried to buy them off, partially succeeding in creating an intellectual and cultural elite that was (and still is) loyal to her. But all this posturing was like trying to stop a wrecking ball with a sheet of paper. The mainstream media, newspapers like La Nacion and Clarin, just couldn’t get enough of the government’s corruption scandals and malpractice. So she attacked them fiercely, to the point of accusing them of human rights violations during the last 70’s dictatorship.
Cristina Kirchner’s mental health was also put into question. Increasingly megalomaniacal, paranoid and hubristic, she would publicly and mercilessly attack anyone who opposed her. She terrorised her officers during her public speeches, by urging them to fear God… and also her. The government organised festivals and events to inaugurate roads, hospitals and buildings named “Nestor Kirchner”. During these festivals, pictures of rival politicians and journalists were used as target practice for children to spit on. She attacked the West in every international venue, suggesting that ISIS beheadings were “cinematographic” and that if anything happened to her, everyone should turn their eyes to the north. She even attacked a grandfather who had gifted a hundred dollars to his grandson, calling him “a cheap old man”. When she won in 2011 she shouted “we will take it all” to the crowds. And she did try.
Cristina’s last year in power, 2015, was a Peronist annus horribilis. In January, Federal Prosecutor Alberto Nisman was murdered. Nisman was the designated prosecutor for the AMIA case. Further back, in 1994, a truck exploded at the door of the Asociación Mutual Israeli Argentina, killing 85 people, and becoming the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history (and in the Western Hemisphere before 9-11). Iran was one of the suspects, together with Hezbollah. In 2013 Pepe Eliaschev, an Argentine journalist, revealed that the government would require Interpol to lift the red notices against Iranian government officials suspected to have been involved in the 94’ bombing. This was later confirmed by the government, and the Iran Memorandum was approved by Congress in 2013. However, the Iranian parliament never ratified it. In Argentina, it had a short life as it was deemed unconstitutional by different courts without ever coming into force.
In January 2015 Nisman claimed that, in consideration for the lifting of the red notices, Iran would facilitate oil and other business to Argentina. He was charging Cristina Kirchner, the Argentine president, with treason and concealment. Three days after appearing on national television and explaining his findings and his claim, Nisman was found dead in his apartment. This was too much for the Argentine society which was also struggling with ever-increasing inflation and rising poverty.
The economy was in shambles. By 2015, the gap between the black market dollar rate and the official dollar rate was around 50%. The Peronist government continued applying the same old recipe for disaster: mob-style price control, inaccurate official stats, populist benefits and handouts (the Central Bank was running on fumes by now) and it even started filling the government offices with fanatics. This was done systematically after Kirchner lost the 2015 election to Mauricio Macri during the transition period, with the purpose of “resisting heroically the return of the right”. Corruption did not stop either in spite of the press uncovering several scandals. It was just endemic. In any case, Cristina Kirchner could not run for office again, as she had run in 2007 and 2011 already. So she chose Daniel Scioli as her candidate. He lost against Macri and this defeat ended 13 years of Peronist governments.
But that’s not the end of the story. Although Macri’s government was not marred by the corruption scandals, the aggression, the hubris and the megalomania that preceded it, the economy did not improve. It worsened.
Shortly after taking office, Macri lifted the currency restrictions and foreign currency could flow freely in and out of the country. He appointed a competent team to help his government improve Argentina’s relationship with the rest of the world and to promote the country abroad. He tidied up the national statistics office and he brought back a semblance of balanced and restrained leadership. The world seemed to be positive about Argentina again, but this only lasted a couple of years. He didn’t correct Peronism’s fundamental mistake: extreme fiscal deficit was still there. The IMF extended a credit of 57 billion dollars in June 2018, but inflation did not decrease as expected. During Macri’s government, the peso was devalued by 550%. He was failing and Kirchner jumped at the opportunity. Her image was too tarnished with corruption to secure a victory in 2019 so she had to choose someone else like she did in 2015. In what was arguably her most unexpected political decision, she chose Alberto Fernández as her presidential candidate keeping the vice-presidency for herself. By not being the presidential candidate, Kirchner tried to downplay her role in a potential future government and campaigning fell mostly on Fernandez's shoulders, who was quickly (and naively) considered by the media as a moderate. A victory would also grant her legal immunity as vice president. This was convenient: by then, she had been prosecuted in 11 criminal trials.
Her move worked. Against all electoral polls, she beat Macri in the primaries (in Argentina all parties' primaries take place simultaneously). This caused such a run against the peso, that Macri was forced to bring back currency controls. The dollar clamp was back. Foreign investors, companies and even brands couldn’t wait to leave the country. In October 2019 Fernandez won the election without needing a second round. Argentina’s economy was not any better than when Cristina Kirchner left power in 2015. Furthermore, the country was now also heavily indebted to the IMF.
Shortly after taking office in December 2019, the Pandemic forced the new Peronist government to put the country into lockdown. Like many other country leaders at the beginning of it, they enjoyed some months of popularity. But in early 2021, some Peronist leaders started boasting that they had been able to cut in line and get their COVID vaccines early. Many members of government, their families and friends also got their vaccines before their turn was due, in an obscene show of political privilege. Additionally, Fernandez pledged to buy vaccines from Russia instead of Europe or America in what many considered a failed geopolitical move: Russia did not deliver as expected and the government took months to get the US to supply the missing shots. America ended up donating what Argentina had paid Russia for.
A few months later, photographs and videos showing a party in the presidential residence during lockdown prompted another scandal. Fernandez went from saying the images were apocryphal, to blaming his wife for celebrating his birthday with a dinner party. In March 2021, Argentina slowly crept out of lockdown after more than a year. It suffered one of the longest lockdowns in the world. Children spent over a year without going to schools or nurseries. Things were not looking good for the Peronist government ahead of the midterm elections.
Surely enough, the midterm elections of 2021 resulted in an anti-Peronist tidal wave. The outcome was the exact opposite of the 2019 results, with the opposition beating Peronism by over 8%. Congress was now split and this meant that Peronism would not be able to pass any laws without an agreement with the opposition. One of the defeated Peronist candidates tried to downplay the results by saying that they “had won by losing”. Cristina was unhappy with the results but, instead of concluding that the reasons for their latest defeat were the ever-declining economy and the Pandemic scandals, she argued that Peronism had not gone far enough and doubled down. The vice-president said that some ministers were not good enough, and the president listened as some of them left. The government brokered a new deal with the IMF, but Cristina’s faction representatives led by her son voted against it. President Fernandez needed the opposition’s help to approve the new IMF agreement. In an institutionally unnatural, twisted and tarnished turn of events, Argentina's vice-president, became her president’s main opposition.
Explaining Peronism is complicated, but for anyone interested in Argentina, its market and its people, it is a fundamental issue. Too much of our personality is explained by it, either because we support it or because we staunchly oppose it. For a time, we all thought that Peronism had been institutionalised. Doing away with its fascist origins Peronism seemed, for a couple of decades at least, to follow and support the constitution. In its current version, though, it has become an anti-constitutional party, willing to trample on individual rights, the separation of powers, the free market economy and every Argentine institution. Society needs to address these issues as quickly as possible. However, by now it is hard to imagine what kind of event needs to take place to induce the Argentines to discuss their problems with honesty and openness.