Ignacio Zuleta
07/24/2021 12:00 AM
Clarín.com
Economy
Updated 07/24/2021 12:00 AM
With Florentine finesse, the ruling party and the opposition defined, in the closing of lists this Saturday, the real meaning of the November elections.
They will not resolve the balance of forces in Congress, but they do put the chiefs of both sides in a position to
discuss a second chance on earth in 2023
. The seniors have left the prominence (or in the competition) to the juniors. They have avoided contesting charges, waiting for November to clarify the panorama: a good election in the province of Buenos Aires immunizes Peronism for the most feared virus: division. A bad result will encourage the recurring schism, which has already passed a decade of defeats, and whose metric regulated the going and coming of Sergio Massa. In the key district, Cristina and Massa, the strongest links in the presidential trifecta, leave the weakest, Alberto, to pay the cost of the elections in the AMBA, which will take place under the storm of the plague, which has brought down giants and big heads around the world, from Trump to Merkel, and with the same climate of crisis and uncertainty that accompanied Peronism in the legislative defeats of 2009 and 2013.In those two shifts, Peronism ruled, and lost to competitive candidates (Kirchner, Scioli, Massa, Insaurralde). Today they rule again, and the pollsters of the ruling party guess other ghosts. The most aided is the disappointment of moderate voters who expected something more from the 2019 winners. The bosses have separated veterans with votes (who could distract), such as Felipe Solá or Daniel Scioli. "They consider me part of the past, nor did they consult me," one of them told me. The closure found them both traveling, like Macri. In the opposition, all the heads of Cambiemos have also withdrawn from the stage: Macri, Patricia Bullrich, Carrió, Pichetto, Posse. They leave the generational line of Larreta, Vidal, Santilli,the result of a turn that they face with an optimism that is measured by the same yardstick as the pessimism of Peronism in the metropolitan region.
They leave the line of fire and gain freedom, to intervene where and when they want
.
It is a tactical success.
Alberto, like Macri, victim of "the others"
Election time is one of overacting.
A sung result will
not modify the legislative tie
that prevents the government from starting a fairly stable management. It is discouraged by external factors that it has not managed to dominate: the inherited economy - debt, stocks, recession, unemployment, capital outflows to the refuge of the dollar - and the Covid plague, which Alberto and his partners have (un) governed. Macri explains the same about his own presidential fate. In the record of his statements - and in the memories that they collected for the book First Time - the collapse of his administration was due to exogenous scourges that he could not overcome: a record drought; the flight to quality of emerging markets attracted by the Trump rate; the cause of the notebooks, which fumigated the possibility of associating foreign companies in the promised land that was the PPP; and the threat of Cristina's return, they (un) governed for him. This climate of conceptual tie,difficult to modify numerically, it gives the legislative elections of November
the opportunity to be the beginning of something different
. Cristina emulates pointing out the "others" as responsible for her mischief. In the judicial rap for the Iran cause, he went so far as to say, before hitting the microphone, in a rejection of the voters that is not easily explained by a political professional: “it seems that they are only governed by what they see in the newspapers, not they can have their own thoughts so that they can analyze a little more deeply what is on television or what is in a newspaper. " He said it on television and it was published in the newspapers. They are frequent temptations in
the country of intransigence and regenerationism
.
With the same self-confidence, Facundo Manes now proposes: "We have to change the collective mentality."
The effort of social engineering of the utopias of the new man cost humanity more than 230 million deaths in the 20th century, victims of world and civil wars, dirty and clean, repressions, revolutions and genocides.
Calling the vote with the illusion of regenerating everything from intransigence is another Creole frivolity.
"The Trojan War will not happen", predicted the playwright Jean Giraudoux ("La guèrre de Troie n'aura pas lieu", 1935), Tranqui, neither will the revolution of Espert nor that of Grabois arrive.
It is easier for
politicians to change than for society to change
, which never changes.
Variable cloud cover for the ruling party
For the government, the weather is one of
defeat in the entire metropolitan region
, where the three members of the presidential trifecta settle their royals: Alberto is CABA, Massa and Cristina are PBA. The game of elusions to accept candidacies expresses the discouragement of the most important leaders. The concerned air with which they moved in the closing of lists recalled the long shadows of 2009, 2013 and 2017. For Peronism, losing is not winning the number of seats to obtain a quorum in Deputies - 129 votes - without having to pay them for each session. Not even in the most pessimistic forecast do they imagine that there is an opposition triumph in the numerical. But few believe that in Buenos Aires the necessary numbers are won to have the proper number to hold sessions or approve structural laws with 129 votes or more. The clubs that meet in La Rosada, Olivos and the Congress receive viscous signals from provinces in which Peronism will win,but due to minor differences to 2019 - La Pampa, Catamarca, Tucumán, San Juan.
Nor are the governors spared from the political effects of the plague
.
From the inside they look at the movements in the AMBA Peronism: a poor result will lead to examination the leadership of Cristina and Massa, to whom they attribute future projects.
Few believe that Alberto has them.
A good result, on the other hand, will encourage Christianity to impose a successor and give oxygen to Massa's project to be the candidate of Peronism in 2023.
The opposition risks a PRO-UCR polarization
These leadership tests are also fought in the opposition. Larreta risks a foray into Buenos Aires at the hands of Santilli. The withdrawal of Gustavo Posse from the list imposes a frank fight between the Pro and the UCR. He pressed until the last moment so that he did not get off, because a STEP of three lists cut support for Manes' radicalism in the first electoral section. It will be
a primary between parties
, a sharp polarization that forces efforts so that it does not leave consequences that, later, threaten unity in the November general elections. It happened to Peronism in 2015 with the PASO Aníbal-Julián. The fight was so strong, expensive, hurtful and sincere in everything, that it dispersed the Peronist vote towards the dissident window of Massa. And that was within tribes of the same party. The defeat in Buenos Aires dragged the national Peronism. This time there are thick lines. Radicalism has recovered oxygen and is going with a candidate who, as Alfredo Cornejo defined in his Rotary talk this week, was not in the Macri-Vidal government and is shielded from attacks due to the inheritance received. That polarization will move Santilli to campaign to attract the Peronist vote in the district. It won't cost you; it's your DNA,It will have the company of Miguel Pichetto and other references of that extraction such as Cristian Ritondo. Santilli shows polls that talk about what he wins, as of today, by 60% to 40% of the votes. What will the radical voter do with his vote if Santilli is identified with a Peronism incompatible with the radical palate?
Larreta, forced to tests of leadership
The risk is run by Larreta, forced to show that he has the capacity to contain all the tribes in his space.
In the CABA it has been difficult to contain the anti-Gist radicals so that they did not present a list to the PASO.
There are so few charges to pay leadership, that he only enabled Ricardo López Murphy's list, in the confidence that he will not reach the floor to enter the mixer, despite the fact that he was lowered so that he would not compete on the outside.
Horacio tries
to recover from the blow of María Eugenia Vidal's refusal to go as a candidate to Buenos Aires
. That indiscipline scratched his bodywork, which his negotiators tried to repair, such as Fernando Straface before the anti-Ninosiglista group of Jesús Rodríguez, Facundo Suárez Lastra, Luis Brandoni and Adolfo Rubinstein. The same leadership tests got him into the fight between the PRO and the UCR in Córdoba. He interrupted Macri's isolation in Switzerland to discuss with him what to do in that province, where the former president had enlisted his party in an alliance with Luis Juez, which left the UCR aside. This is the second most important party in that province, which also has the most prestigious local leader, Mario Negri, also president of the interblock in the Deputies.From the dialogue between Macri and Larreta came the conciliatory mission of Patricia Bullrich, who negotiated the revision of everything that Macri had screwed up on last May's trip. The consolation of these vicissitudes is the same that reassures the ruling party:
there is no candidate or vaccine that takes out or adds a single vote to the ruling party or the opposition
. They are paper tigers, Mao would say. What these elections define are individual destinies, because the interests of the whole are protected in the solidity of the Argentine system, which still survives the crisis of demoliberal political engineering that is collapsing throughout the world. With any ideological sign. Here the basics continue to work: united Peronism wins, divided Peronism, loses, united Non-Peronism, it can beat divided Peronism, divided Non-Peronism, it loses for sure. With this protocol, implacable as a wooden artifact - to put it vizziotly - since 1983 Peronism has won in three shifts (Menem and Kirchner and their reelections, Alberto) and Non-Peronism in another three (Alfonsín, De la Rúa, Macri) .The two political families have alternated - under different names and formats - since 1916 in all democratic processes. Together they represent the
80% of the population around a moderate agenda.
Without a boss it is difficult to agree on strategies
The opposition and the ruling party have the same format of horizontal coalitions, which are ordered according to the relationship between the chiefs that make it up.
None of them recognize the others dominion over the whole.
The absence of leadership is paid in the difficulty to agree on a strategy.
Being in government makes it easy to identify the target.
More so when this is a government that
has been in office for two years and has not yet started its administration
: 1) it does not fix the economy received, which is a field of adjustment a la Macri;
2) nor does it fulfill its platform of changes to dismantle the political engineering of the previous government (the judicial agenda, to synthesize it in a frozen field for Peronism);
3) in the fight against the plague, what good or bad things can do for any government in the world.
But it takes the beating that the virus has given to all the rulers of the world, except the dictators, who keep up with slogans like those that Kicillof's chief of staff, Carlos Bianco, uses, "there is no place for anarchy here." - The Joker is going to find out.
For any government, counting the dead is the only thing left in a war, and this plague is like a war.
It is difficult for you to do well with that agenda, especially if it gets out of control in
internal fights in the health area
, that began with the presidency of Alberto and that have not stopped. In that fight we must include the dispute between Ginés and the Gollán Cubans over the nationalization, or not, of the health system and the "bed" from Olivos to Ginés to remove him from his post, a fact that left the ministry without leadership. Anger cost the government the departure of the driver of the war at the worst moment. He continues to pay it, because he has not remedied that defeat. To illustrate the parable: Ginés was the editor of the Frente de Todos platform in 2019 as coordinator of the technical teams of the national PJ. Cecilia Nicolini - the lady of the mails - entered Olivos when Alberto was already president, led by the Chilean Marco Enríquez-Ominami, (a lobbyist for oriental companies, and not from Uruguay) and Cristina's putative son. Today
Ginés is at home, and Nicolini is Chancellor in the shadows
.