What are you celebrating?

Lionel Messi and the national team celebrate the arrival in Buenos Aires with the World Cup. MARTIN VILLAR (REUTERS)

The Argentines are honoring their national soccer team in a ceremony never seen before due to its dimensions or its emotional intensity.

It is the consecration of those players.

Literal: its elevation to a sacred place.

The celebration was improvised at the crossroads of the main avenues of all the cities of the country.

Its center was in Buenos Aires, in the obelisk.

The crowd that celebrated the victory over France last Sunday attended spontaneously there.

There he returned this Tuesday, to meet the recently arrived team from Qatar.

The mobilization overflowed the center of the city, blocked the highways, jumped scale.

More than three million people in a frenzy that turned chaotic.

The soccer players had to suspend their tour in a double-decker bus, discovered, due to the insecurity to circulate.

They ended in a symbolic greeting, from a helicopter in which Lionel Scaloni and Lionel Messi presumably walked with the cup.

The mobilization far exceeded the largest concentrations in national history.

In the same place where the selected one thought to arrive, Raúl Alfonsín gathered "barely" a million people to close his electoral campaign in October 1983. It was the end of the bloody military dictatorship.

Today the number of people who left their homes to celebrate tripled.

Anything fits into that magnitude: joy, gratitude, fanaticism, irrationality.

What are you celebrating?

Of course, soccer.

It's been 36 years since the country won its last cup.

The second, that of Mexico, that of Maradona's goal against the English, which aspires to be the best goal in history.

The Argentines meet again with that joy, stimulated by various peculiarities.

The one with a frustrating start, against Arabia.

That of a heart attack outcome, due to its drama.

They are not the only singular notes.

This triumph in a World Cup was different from the previous ones.

For the first time, he finds the Argentines integrated into a very rare consensus.

The one that took to the streets in 1978 was a society fractured by military repression.

In the basements of that Argentina, State terrorism carried out its atrocities.

In 1986 the contradiction was not political but sporting.

The followers of César Luis Menotti, the coach of 1978, challenged Carlos Bilardo, who had to resist the Alfonsín officials who wanted to displace him.

In this 2022, there is no polarization around Lionel Scaloni's team.

The Argentines, who have spent more than two centuries of their history in an incessant confrontation, do not know themselves in this unanimity.

In what minute will they have experienced such harmony?

Was it almost 10 years ago, in March 2013, when Jorge Bergoglio was elected Pope?

Maybe.

At the center of these splendors is Messi.

The best of the celebration is for him.

It is the apotheosis of him.

It is not just about the exaltation of a sports prodigy, the provider of countless joys.

This time there is something else: the captain is applauded.

In Qatar you could see the result of a metamorphosis.

That of the solitary star, cut out, unattainable, which becomes the leader of a group.

Messi was once again the forward of a borderline virtuosity with magic.

The one who makes the goal or the one who designs the play from which the goal will come out.

But it was more.

He took charge of the team, held the others back and from the inimitable height of his capabilities, he demonstrated that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

The Argentines discovered a new Messi and also applaud that show.

This inventory of reasons is insufficient to explain the hubbub that exists in the country.

In that joy there seems to be something more.

You have to look for it in politics.

Because in the vicissitudes of any selected team there is an inescapable political factor.

It's simple: soccer has become the mysterious redoubt of national identity.

Understanding this aspect of the phenomenon forces us to take our eyes off center stage.

You have to look at the context.

Those who go out, joyful, without obeying any summons, to wrap themselves in the flag to take to the streets, are part of a disenchanted society.

Public opinion researchers are stunned by the responses they get in their qualitative surveys.

It is common for the women and men consulted to start crying when they are made to talk about their daily lives.

The one who goes out for a walk with his son and cannot take him to the movies because the price of the ticket unbalances the entire budget tears up.

The one who comments that he had to change his son's school because the quota had become inaccessible sobs.

The lady breaks that she doesn't know when she will see her grandchildren again because her son decided to move to another country.

"And the politics?

What do you do in the face of all this?

Answer one of the guests to those

: “Politics is an empty circus.

The politicians continue to do their show, but the public has left.

The restlessness that appears in these testimonies had a technical manifestation last year.

The 2021 legislative elections were the elections with the highest abstention rate in the history of democracy refounded in 1983. In a country where voting is compulsory, more than 30% of the electorate stopped attending the elections.

It is not difficult to conjecture the reasons for this indifference.

For a decade the economy has been stagnant.

Inflation has been on the rise for 15 years and is already reaching 100% per year.

The salary collapses and the only employment that expands is the informal one.

Legions of middle-class workers fall into poverty, which has stabilized at around 40%.

The pandemic struck in that previous frame and created more than two million new poor people.

70% of the population believes that last year has been better than this one and that this one is better than the one to come.

In contrast to this desolation acts a factious political class.

The proposals of each current, Cristina Kirchner's Frente de Todos, or Mauricio Macri's Together for Change, seem to exhaust themselves in the stigmatization of the other opponent as the cause of all the problems.

It is a sterile conflict.

Governments pass but the crisis continues.

Incompetence is widespread.

Yesterday there was a strident demonstration: despite the fact that it was known that a human tide would be unleashed, officials were unable to coordinate a security operation.

"Scaloni, arm the government team", is a joke that circulates through the networks.

The repetition of mistakes makes the public leave the circus.

The diagnosis appears in the manuals: in Argentina a crisis of representation is deepening.

Against the backdrop of this pasty apathy, the festivities take on a meaning that exceeds football.

The Argentines seem to recover, regarding the saga of their team, a vibration not experienced for a long time.

Sport provides them with that motivation, that enthusiasm, that politics does not.

The object of that veneration is, for some, very specific.

They appreciate a result.

The goals and the cup.

Others are commemorating something more misty and imprecise.

They salute a method, a discipline.

Because the team that won the victory in Qatar had been shipwrecked in the World Cup in Russia.

Disappointed, powerless, Messi threatened to quit the team.

On the verge of collapse, Claudio Tapia, the president of the Argentine Football Association, handed him the baton.

Messi sealed an alliance with Scaloni.

Both returned to the sources.

To the spirit of that José Pekerman team, which the two joined to play the 2006 World Cup in Germany.

They summoned new players, rearmed the midfield, designed a strategy, embraced a style: sobriety, intelligence, grit.

Argentines saturate the streets of the main cities and drive Buenos Aires crazy to praise those who bring them the third World Cup.

Many perhaps don't know it but, in addition to the victory, they are celebrating the rationality that hides behind all victory.

They go out to meet a group of people and a culture in which they feel represented.

It is not a political message.

But it is a message that politicians should decipher.

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