Javier Milei, the symptom of an electorate sick with rage and inconsolation

A seasoned analyst who combs through spreadsheets, looks at numbers and chats with politicians, businessmen and red-circle leaders has for some weeks been somewhere between surprised and alarmed. He asks for the secrecy of identity to avoid suspicions but pronounces a heavy diagnosis: if all continues in this bad direction, Javier Miley He can reach a second round and even be president. The “everything” is the economy but above all a policy immersed in tactical battles to better position itself within its bowels.

This is not the only one. In contacts with leaders with offices in Casa Rosada, Congress, and offices in downtown Buenos Aires, Milei’s name comes up again and again. It is the phantom that frightens the two coalitions that have occupied center stage for more than a decade and that experience a wearying and aggressive internalism. Neither of the two fronts manages to break a dangerous dynamic of inbreeding. They talk to each other while their constituents suffer from demonic prices, insecurity and, now, blackouts in 40-degree heat.

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“The crack is no longer enough to explain or define the political map. There is a general disorder of the system and an aggravation of the struggles within each political front. They fight each other more than each other. Cristina Kirchner and La Campora contra Alberto Fernandez; Horace Rodriguez Larreta against Patricia Bullrich. And Macri who does a lot and says less”, explains one of the interlocutors consulted for this column.

Neither the vice-president nor the former president have difficulty commanding their group. But neither are they willing to run away and let the newbies do, plan, and even make mistakes. the lucid Jorge Asis He told me this week that there is something of a filicidal attitude among the most exalted political leaders. They resisted the parricides who wanted to “kill” them – politically, of course – and now it seems that they are taking revenge. However, the leadership crisis is the elephant moving its trunk in the middle of the living room.

Meanwhile, Javier Milei travels through inland towns, spends four hours explaining his dollarization plan to the establishment, does a media roundup, and ends up getting caught up in shouting matches on TV. On social networks – that rather toxic sounding board of the microclimate of public opinion – the majority messages, far from condemning him, praise him. They reward him for playing strapping and breaking boundaries.

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“People are very angry and they have already understood that politicians are the enemies of their well-being”, explains the economist who has started to accelerate the stages of his campaign with his intimates. In addition to the announcements of candidates in the provinces, he will begin to broadcast the projects of each of the eight ministries within which, he says, he will structure his government.

The adversities are inflation of 6.6% in February and the suspicion that this will be the bottom for the following months; the destructive drought that heralds famine and lack of dollars; and now international financial instability due to the banking crisis, which began in California’s booming Silicon Valley and has spread with the speed of a virus around the world.

“There is no longer any doubt that there is a bomb, but the important thing is to lengthen the fuse, because nobody wants it to explode,” they say in the Together for Change camp. The interlocutor modulates what other JxC leaders have begun to say in public, repentant after the declaration that a few weeks ago they were seeking to torpedo a debt-to-peso swap which, more than a voluntary act, was an imposition of reality. There were questions about the form, but not that it was impossible to pay the bill as is.

This vision of avoiding a collapse is shared by Larreta, the radicals Gerardo Morales and Facundo Manes and something also by Bullrich. To find their place in JxC, everyone needs the government of Alberto and Cristina Fernández to keep control over the main variables.

The rising cost of living, signs of a gradual slowdown in economic activity, backlogs in critical imports and wage increases below inflation forecasts in the first four months are compounding a situation more and more fragile.

In the opposition and the ruling party, they see that Macri is on a different tone. More inclined to denounce the imbalances left by the fourth Kirchner government, the former president returns to Argentina on Monday ready to intervene in the design of the next party in power, both in names and, above all, in direction.

He does not say for the moment whether or not he will be a candidate for the presidency and oscillates between being a mentor and exercising a certain guardianship of the power of the future. He does it because he can.

Macri will be in Chile today, as announced by former President Sebastián Piñera, at 4:15 p.m., in the Las Condes mansion of the Andrés Bello University, to launch an international group of former leaders of the Ibero-American right. , who promised to confront and reverse the wave of leftist governments in Latin America.

Besides Piñera and Macri, the “International Group on Freedom and Democracy” is composed of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón (Mexico), Iván Duque and Andrés Pastrana (Colombia), José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy (Spain) and Jorge Quiroga, among others. They are not together just because of politics, but because they understand that leftist governments face serious difficulties that can weaken democratic institutions. The group of former presidents seeks “to have a space for reflection, coordination, dialogue and action to strengthen freedom and democracy in Latin America”. Back to power, of course.

This is the other bell of what will happen next week in Buenos Aires, with a meeting of the Group of Puebla, another international, more on the left, which is encouraged by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (Mexico), Lula Da Silva ( Brazil), Marco Enriquez-Ominami (Chile), Ernesto Samper (Colombia), Pepe Mujica (Uruguay), Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), Evo Morales (Bolivia), among others.

It will be part of the week in which March 24 will be commemorated, the day of remembrance of the beginning of the last and bloodiest military dictatorship, in light of the 40 years of democracy that will be celebrated in December. That day should assume the new president. What if it was Javier Milei?

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