Argentina's President Javier Milei speaks during a business event in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 26, 2024. Photo: Reuters.
By Atilio Boron – Jul 21, 2024
Javier Milei’s government is sliding Argentina towards a crisis of unprecedented proportions. An integral, multidimensional, multifaceted crisis. The unlikely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economics is sinking the main economic indicators to unprecedented levels. Activity indicators are falling, factories are running at half speed, retailers are seeing their sales plummet, inflation is far from being abated, the dollar is soaring, unemployment is growing uncontrollably and workers’ salaries, whether registered or precarious, as well as retirement and pension amounts, are collapsing month after month. All this is celebrated as a success by the exotic parishioners of the anarcho-capitalist sect and its unscrupulous beneficiaries.
Of course, such a debacle, whose social and political repercussions are extremely serious, is not new in our history. The genocidal dictatorship, the Menem period and, more recently, the Macri government promoted this project with the eternal hope that after so much pain – considered inevitable – the Argentine economy would be reborn, freed from its statist and “populist” legacies, and would resolutely move towards development. This bet on free markets was nothing but a disastrous illusion, since it had never been verified in history, in any country, and Argentina was no exception. But it served as a pretext to hide the fact that it favors the regressive redistribution of income and concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands. We know how such neoliberal trials ended: they created much more unjust societies, increased the number of poor and indigent people, deepened the national economic backwardness and our external dependence.
With a smile
However, the current case presents an abject peculiarity: when Martinez de Hoz presented his program of neoliberal refoundation of the Argentine economy, he did it with a solemn and severe tone, recognizing, like a doctor diagnosing a seriously ill patient, that it was a bitter medicine, but necessary to get the Argentine economy out of the swamp of underdevelopment. On the other hand, when his ideological heirs announce the same policy, they did so with a luminous smile on their faces. Revealing the sadistic enjoyment they derive from the work of destruction commanded by the “mole”, whose self-assigned mission is to destroy the State from within and, with it, liquidate the economic and social conquests achieved during a century of popular struggles. This and no other is the fundamental objective of the current political experiment.
Such a project can only weaken the vitality of our democracy, which means that Argentina today can only be rigorously conceptualized as a semi-democracy, with a tendency to degenerate into a frankly authoritarian regime. The presidential arrogance, the fanaticism with which Javier Milei adheres to his ideas, together with his absolute disdain for dialogue -since, as an enlightened prophet, the president believes he owns the absolute truth- crystallizes in a conglomerate of attitudes and practices deeply the opposite to the democratic game. Hence, his permanent abuse of the division of powers and the insults and rudeness he dedicates to deputies, senators and governors -the nefarious “political caste”-, as well as to journalists and politicians who do not share his delusions, in addition to his open defiance of the rules of the democratic republic when he threatens to veto any law passed by the Congress that is not to his liking. Having said this, it is obvious that, due to the nature of his administration, as well as his outrageous personal style, the President is only one step away from becoming a dictator, violating the powers established by the Constitution and the laws of our country.
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Deputies
Legislative session for the Ley Bases. The President repeatedly charged against the parliamentarians, calling them “rats”.
This deterioration in the quality of our democracy takes place with the poorly disguised complicity of the “serious press”, which long ago stopped doing journalism, and of prosecutors and judges absorbed in the preservation of their undemocratic privileges, who do not make the slightest gesture to avoid the authoritarian outcome that entails the despotic exercise of presidential power. The institutional panorama worsens when one takes note of the increasing limitations to the civil and political rights of the citizenship imposed by these farcical libertarians who, as recent events show, conceive freedom of assembly and expression, or peaceful protest, as terrorist acts or as conspiracies aimed at producing a coup d’état.
Pious lies
With Milei’s government, Argentina not only became a more unjust and unequal society. The quality of its democracy also suffered, increasingly discredited in the eyes of the people. The President’s “squeezing” of legislators and provincial governors, practiced in broad daylight, and the scandalous buying and selling of votes in the National Congress to approve the Ley Bases, the DNU 70 or any initiative of the Executive strengthened the conviction that corruption is entrenched in the heights of the State and that popular sovereignty and representative democracy are pious lies spread by the ruling autocracy. As the former president of Brazil, Fernando H. Cardoso, once recalled in referring to the vicissitudes of democracy in Latin America, situations such as those just described “impregnate the democratic regime with the smell of farce”.
Despite the seriousness of the diagnosis, we still have time to avoid the destruction of our democracy. Of course, it will not be its institutions that will preserve us from such a tragedy. Neither legislators nor judges or prosecutors will come to our aid to recover the democratic order. Neither will the hegemonic press. Only the massive and peaceful presence of the masses in the streets and squares of the republic will be able to put a stop to the establishment of an authoritarian regime. The institutions, it hurts to admit it (but it is much worse to deny it), have betrayed democracy. As citizens we are defenseless, and only our protagonism will save us from falling once again into a cruel dictatorship, dressed so far in shabby pseudo-democratic garb.
(Resumen Latinoamericano – English)
Atilio Borón
Atilio A. Borón is a Harvard Graduate professor of political theory at the University of Buenos Aires and was executive secretary of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). He has published widely in several languages a variety of books and articles on political theory and philosophy, social theory, and comparative studies on the capitalist development in the periphery. He is an international analyst, writer and journalist and profoundly Latinoamerican.
