A celebration of weakness

Seven and a half months before the presidential elections and just over 10 months from the end of his constitutional term, the President Alberto Fernandez ended up turning what will surely be his last opening address of a regular session of the National Congress into a celebratory spectacle of his manifest weakness and its undeniable and inevitable decline.

A staging that does not content itself with reporting the delirium of the re-election project of a president whose leadership has long wandered in the maze of insignificance, but also of his definitive abandonment to some of the dominant clichés of a Kirchnerism which, despite recurring condescension and sometimes humiliation, continues to express its contempt deepest for him. .

A tedious two-hour speech that oscillated between listing the alleged “achievements” of his management in the context of a narrative increasingly decoupled from realityand virulence attack on justice and the media as an offering to an impassive vice-president – once a mentor – who does not even make an effort to hide her deep indifference towards whom she herself has anointed as candidate for president.

As one of the many clear proofs of this profound lack of connection with reality, it is worth mentioning the particular reference to the scourge of inflation, which he described in a very brief passage of his speech as a structural problem in Argentina and a legacy of former management. Despite Fernández’s lukewarm justification and his attempt to assign responsibilities exclusively to the previous government, the truth is that since his inauguration on December 10, 2019, cumulative inflation has already exceeded 324%, in an inflationary dynamic whose last precedent dates back to the “hyper” of the late 80s.

Despite the force of failure and the manifest incapacity of his administration, President chose to focus on data of questionable legitimacy or lacking context, which deepen the increasingly widespread perception of a president isolated and removed from the daily reality of millions of Argentines. This is the only way to understand the emphasis on highlighting the supposed “milestones” of its management: Argentina as “one of the countries that has made the most progress in recent years”, the protection of ” pensions exceeding inflation by 12 points”; that “formal employment increased by 4.1%”, that “more than 3,000 of the 5,800 construction sites in progress have been completed”, with a “collection that has been growing for 29 months”, among other things as special as references questionable.

This delirious story was accompanied by an unrewarded “profession of Christian faith”, embodied in the exaggerated and vehement denunciation of a legal-media conspiracy which would aim for the “political disqualification” of the vice-president.

A speech that, in short, is a symbol of the fundamental contradiction that Alberto Fernández could never resolve, that image that Cristina skilfully used to regain power, that of the promise of a “moderate kirchnerism”. Two facets that the President has never been able to synthesize or agree on, and which have led him to oscillate in a schizophrenic way like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde between the apology of moderation and the calls to “put an end to the fracture” and the strategy of polarization, the friend-enemy logic and the politics of tension, thus deepening not only the perception of a weak and extremely conditioned presidency but also that of an ineffective management.

As one might expect, the construction of this particular and hallucinated narrative which seems to describe a kind of “imaginary country” in which the president lives, as well as the Kirchnerist “revival” of denunciation of the media-judicial corporation opposition, have to correlate the extremely high level of rejection which, at this point, already seems impossible to reverse. In this sense, a recent study by Alaska Communication reports that the management assessment of President Fernández is close to the highest in the historical series, with 72.3% negative images.

However, this assessment of management, with an electoral process already imminent and an inflation that would be far from being controlled in the sense envisioned by Massa, reveals not only the infeasibility of a re-election of Fernández, but also It seriously compromises the electoral chances of any Peronism.

Continue reading: