Latin America is politically in turmoil. The traces of the fascist gangs that occupied the headquarters of the three powers in Brasilia crying out for a coup. Fortunately, those authoritarian traces were neutralized immediately, but it is evident that they are crouching to wait for another opportunity to assault the institutions of democracy.
President Lula will need all his experience and skill to consolidate his third presidency and defeat Bolsonaro, a much more arduous task than defeating Bolsonaro at the polls.
Peru It is a real powder keg where dozens of deaths have to be lamented since Pedro Castillo he was dismissed by the same Congress that he tried to dissolve by decree. the current president Dina Boluarte Hang on a wire. For years the leaders of that Andean nation have expressed the fragility of a fragmented power system in which the parties are efficient in blocking each other but not in building a lasting management.
On the other side of the mountain range, gabriel boric His management is becoming uphill due to repeated resignations in the cabinet and a vertiginous drop in opinion polls, accelerated since the defeat in the plebiscite to reform the Magna Carta. The bicoalitionism that has prevailed since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship has imploded, but it has not been replaced by a solid scheme. The usual ones left, different ones arrived and the disappointment continues to confirm that the new is not necessarily synonymous with the best.
For his part, bolivian it is regionally and party-wise fractured in an open and socially delicate scenario. The governor of the rich state of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, is in prison and the strikes continue to lacerate the Plurinational State.
And in Ecuador We must always be attentive to what happens with the situation of the native peoples, the balance point (or imbalance) of the institutional progress of that dollarized country.
Despite the economic instability, Argentina has managed to respect the result of the polls.
Argentina, the reverse of Latin America
In all cases, political instability coexists with macroeconomic stability. The markets seem to look at the vicissitudes of party life with relative alienation. As long as they play with the collar but don’t mess with the dog, there’s nothing to be alarmed about.
Exactly, the reverse phenomenon occurs in Argentina. We pass the forty years of the democratic restoration with the record – on December 10 – of five presidencies that complete his term. Gone is the memory of the five presidents in one week. Twenty years later, there are plenty of disputes and conflicts within and outside of each coalition, perhaps even the rules are bent a bit, but no one thinks about the possibility of breaking them. The decibels of some speeches are strong, but that “dog that barks does not bite” applies.
Of course, the institutional difference in favor of the residents of the South American neighborhood does not translate positively into the productive and financial indicators.. We closed 2022 qualifying as world soccer champions in Qatar and semifinalists in the global inflation tournament together with Venezuela, Lebanon and Zimbabwe. The tenants of the Casa Rosada begin and end their terms, but prices continue to rise and the gross product per capita to decline.
“How good we were, when we were bad” could be an additional stanza to our national anthem. We hastily and relentlessly devalued ourselves, minimizing ambitions. So much so that some officials celebrate not having reached three digits in the Consumer Price Index and two members of the Budget Commission of the Honorable Chamber of Deputies of the Nation dispute over Twitter who won the bet for the final number of inflation of 2022. They put a piglet at stake, perhaps to confirm that beyond the conceptual differences, both agree not to choose the Argentine peso as a means of payment.
“The tenants of the Casa Rosada begin and end their terms, but prices continue to rise and the gross product per capita decreases”
Not even the brilliant Alberto Olmedo in his character as Costa Pobre would have raised it in such a bizarre way (millennials and nostalgics can search YouTube for eighties episodes of the great national capómico).
Massa’s decision to respect the agreement with the IMF, without qualms about the Frente de Todos and the opposition.
The agreement with the IMF, a tacit consensus for the Argentine economy
Anecdotes aside, we can summarize our quick tour of the southern cosmic belt that Respect for the rules of the game is a necessary and not a sufficient condition to guarantee development and growthand that the same applies in reverse: long periods of compliance with the macroprudential rules of the economy are essential, but they do not necessarily facilitate institutional harmony.
Although the textbooks say otherwise and occasional ideologues insist on causality and determinism, reality does not allow itself to be so easily trapped in rigid schemes, no matter how articulated and lengthy they appear. The presidential election challenge in Argentina consists, precisely, in build flexibly from the present political stability the lack of economic stability.
In a few weeks, it will be one year since the sanction by law of the agreement with the International Monetary Fund. The opposition and a fraction of the ruling party agreed to vote for him. And the Kirchnerism, which opposed it on the premises, ended up supporting months later the arrival at the Ministry of Economy of Sergio Massa, who decisively assumed the commitment to put into practice what his predecessor Martín Guzmán -intellectual father of the project- designed but could not implement.
Until now, all those who appear as candidates in the Frente de Todos voted, promoted or accepted what was negotiated with Kristalina Georgieva. So, in fact, there is a tacit consensusa Moncloa Pact -culpable- around concrete measures: reduction of the fiscal deficit, limit to the monetary issue, positive interest rates, reduction of subsidies and stimuli to exports.
If the tacit were made explicit and the competition was raised around the discussion of the leadership and the teams to effectively implement the common goals, we could reduce the exchange rate gap and also the one that separates the political results from the economic ones. The game of overplay differences and taking refuge in “the moral difference” to ignore the ethics of responsibility is as hypocritical as it is frustrating.
The electoral competition could be a chance to take advantage of the opportunities that the regional and global scenario presents to Argentina. A challenge that needs, to be taken advantage of, a generation willing to turn the page and not a caste that insists on the permanent and useless revision of history.
