Before the INDEC releases the inflation rate for April, which threatens to be around 8%, President Alberto Fernández acknowledged that the data “is not what we want” and analyzed the current economic scenario. He also criticized the opposition and contradicted his Economy Minister, Sergio Massa.
“The Argentine economy has rare, unique characteristics that are difficult to explain from world experiences,” the president began. “We have 33 months of consecutive growth in registered employment. And the first quarter, it was the highest industry growth in I don’t know how many years. One sees that there is a movement in the economy that makes the economy work effectively,” he developed. But he admitted that he also finds inflation “a very serious problem” and “very difficult to handle.” There, he introduced the concept of “psychological inflation”, which earned him so much criticism.
“We had a run in April that brought the dollar to $500, and in a week prices were back… up and down,” recalled Fernández. And he pointed out that after that decline that marked the currency in the parallel market, prices did not fall.
“This rise in prices operates in the heads of Argentines, as all this rise is going to have an impact on prices, and there is a rise in prices,” he said. “We have a very serious problem to solve,” he added.
In this context, he revealed a conversation he had with his Finance Minister last night.
“Yesterday I was talking to Sergio (Massa) and I told him ‘we have to set ourselves some definitive objective to stop this’, because there are many causes that are generating this. One, speculation, that there may be a devaluation,” he said. Immediately afterwards, he stated: “What many criticized me and that I called self-constructed inflation, is precisely that, what is called psychological inflation, which is not in the consumer, but in the small merchant.”
“The goal is to curb inflation, Sergio has tried, at some point it worked and at another, it didn’t,” he said.
The definition of the Head of State takes place hours before the INDEC releases the CPI for April, which could replicate the 7.7% -the highest in 20 years- that it marked in March. “It is not what we want,” said Fernández when asked about today’s data.
“Inflation is a problem and to combat it I cannot be a candidate, I have to be president,” he said yesterday during an official act. He ended the discussion around his candidacy. But his statements were also read as a shot for raising the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, who sounds like a candidate for the Frente de Todos.
“Some media interpreted that it was a metamessage for Sergio,” he clarified in dialogue with Radio 10-. It’s my opinion, it’s what I think. I know what a campaign is and one has to dedicate a lot of time to it, it is a singular wear and tear. I need to leave the next president or president a more orderly country.”
With a retrospective look, the president listed the “obstacles” he faced during his administration, such as – he mentioned – the legacy of the Government of Mauricio Macri, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the drought, and stressed that despite this, the country grew 16 points in the last three years.
He again mentioned the obstacles his government faced, starting with the legacy of the Macri government, and continuing with the rest of the external factors that conditioned his administration. We grew 16 points, he highlighted. “It’s not little”.
And he assured that Argentina has “an incredible growth opportunity ahead, because what the world is going to demand the most is in Argentina.”
Criticism of the opposition
Alberto Fernández reiterated his criticism of the opposition and pointed against Together for Change and Javier Milei.
“When one hears that public education must be eliminated because it is a school of indoctrination… Public education in Argentina had two great precursors, (Juan Bautista) Alberdi and (Domingo) Sarmiento. They were both liberals. Did they think that? to indoctrinate people? No, they thought about it because knowledge was central to the world to come,” said Fernández.
“It turns out that the so-called liberals now say that public education is a school of indoctrination,” he said. “And when one hears them say that the solution for the economy is to dollarize… When an economy becomes dollarized, it loses a fundamental tool of economic policy, which is the currency. And when the management of the currency is lost, it already we live in convertibility,” he warned.
Fernández agreed that the economy must be “stabilized”, but pointed out that what the opposition is proposing “is adjustment” and “suffering of the humblest sectors.” “The ‘club of the devaluators’ has its operational arm in Cambiemos and Milei,” he said.
The intern in the Front of All
The president differed from Sergio Massa by defending PASO as a mechanism to resolve the candidacies of the Frente de Todos.
“We have a different conceptual view. My affection or my respect for him does not change anything, not at all. I do not believe that what destabilizes the management of a government is the internal democracy of the space that governs, because that is as much as saying that the Democracy weakens with democracy,” the president said. “It’s inexplicable,” he added.
In recent days, the leader of the Frente Renovador asked to stop “wasting time” with “sterile” inmates and considered it a “very serious mistake” to go to inmates.
“I did not feel it as a squeeze, I simply do not share it,” he said about the statements of the head of the Treasury.
Fernández said that the FdT “must have a mechanism for the democratic organization of space” and maintained that this can only be achieved with the vote of society. “Not that we sit down between three or four leaders and fix what piece of the list we each take,” he contrasted.
Likewise, almost as a warning, he confided: “I do not believe that the leadership of our space has the irrationality to put governability at risk for a STEP. Because then they would be militating in a space of madmen, and I do not believe that”.
On the contrary, he asserted that those who generate instability in Argentina “are the concentrated powers that have their spokesmen in the opposition.” “That is the problem that Argentina has in economic stability and to govern. The problem is not in the Front of All. And they are not going to convince me otherwise,” he reinforced.
