The confusion is evident as evident as the role played by this
outsider
of the established policy in intensive use of the presidency.
Everything seems to shake at the incantation of a change that the President incessantly proclaims on social networks.
However, if we look with some perspective, we can see continuities that are difficult to break.
We often hear lies and metaphors: the chainsaw, the blender, “the shitty politicians,” the “rats' nest” in Congress, which were transmitted in the campaign and now from the Government.
In the liberal tradition, which does not coincide with the President's libertarian passion, the concept of freedom used to be linked to tolerant attitudes, inclined to dialogue and to reasons and arguments subject to criticism.
The past belied these ideals when, under the influence of Jacobin styles, freedom was transformed into a projectile that is fired at the opponent.
Some spectator will say that, even with this verbal disaster, this is unprecedented news.
When in fact was it fought with so much fervor in the name of freedom?
In reality, the issue has little originality because it renews a persistent tradition: the way of conceiving politics as the task in which enemies must be eliminated.
Our politics are dualistic and polarizing.
One and the other confronted, people and anti-people, today statism and anti-statism.
These polarizations run through our past and were accentuated in the last twenty years under the influence of the hegemonic project of Kirchnerism.
If the ends are modified, since the economy proposed by Milei has nothing to do with the disaster that those governments bequeathed to us, the means are the same.
Then and now, the political debate is infected with a verbal incontinence that draws dividing lines;
What was previously the mafia of the “hegemonic media” or the judicial system is now “the filthy and corrupt caste.”
The verbal fierceness, far from being attenuated, is fed with each change of government.
In this sense, everything changes so that nothing changes.
As dramatic as these dualisms are the misfortunes of a government that says goodbye with mega inflation and those of a government that takes office to deactivate that bomb.
Nothing new: this is the third crisis in the chain of decline.
The short-term effects were hyperinflation and an exponential increase in poverty.
Now we bear the same scourge.
To contain hyperinflation we are paying the price, not for a bulldozer to reform the State, but for a blender of the income of retirees, of low-quality informal jobs, of the middle class in sharp decline;
a poverty that borders, like 1989-1990 and 2001-2002, on a figure that rises to over 50% of the population.
There is of course talk of recession, but I wonder if we are not on the way to suffering a “great depression” as they said in the United States of the economy that succumbed after the crash of 1929 and had devastating effects on employment and activity level.
It will be seen, although in the past the discomfort of this collapse was cushioned by a complicity that does not exist now.
The Menem and Kirchner governments, which inherited both crises, were protected by union guardians who, when they go from the ruling party to the opposition, immediately launch mobilizations and strikes into the arena.
If the Government's nerves do not respond, the horizon of destabilization, which was clouded at the end of De la Rúa's presidency, may darken again.
Finally, another negative continuity hangs over the will for change: the risk of ungovernability, which afflicted non-Peronism in the process of governing.
With populism, with benign or hostile hegemonies, when Peronism governs the offer of governability survives to the extent possible.
Alfonsín and De la Rúa could not exorcise that ghost;
Macri did it halfway.
What awaits Milei in the face of this background?
We will have to react as soon as possible because the government plan has fissures, the teams in the Executive Branch to administer a State, which they ideologically abhor, are still incomplete, officials enter and leave, while the inconsistencies of a political culture, at the same time factional and polarizing, prevent the development of government coalitions.
This is another negative continuity that impacts a minority government no matter how you look at it.
It is a minority in the provinces, in Congress and only has majority support at the polls which, according to surveys, continues to decline.
By the way, there are exceptions in the ranks of the PRO that open the possibility of coalition, but previous experiences conspire against that eventuality.
Neither the Alliance government between 1999 and 2001, nor that of Macri between 2015 and 2019, were able to consolidate effective government coalitions.
The poor coalition experience therefore works against it;
another continuity that denotes the difficulties in achieving a satisfactory balance between ends and means.
The derogatory goals are in sight: dismantle the State-centric in the Nation and provinces, and cut off tax privileges and special regimes (either by putting a hand in the trusts).
Contrary to the noise with which these libertarian goals are proclaimed, the means to carry out this ambitious enterprise are conspicuous by their absence.
So long and eventful is this continuity that the historian of liberal origin, Vicente Fidel López, already described this contradiction in the men of 1810:
“Liberalism of ends is a pseudo-philosophical liberalism, which falsely and commonly allies itself with illiberal and absolute personalism.” of the media…”
Let's hope that history does not repeat itself.
Natalio Botana is a political scientist and historian. Professor Emeritus of the Torcuato Di Tella University