With Alberto out, Peronism returns to Cristina’s finger

There was a time when Domingo Cavallo could not appear on television. The memory of the corralito and the outbreak of 2001 weighed more heavily in the collective memory than the zero inflation of the first years of the Convertibility Plan. When the journalists interviewed him, the rejection of the audience that did not want to listen to him immediately arose. Sometimes, it was the ex-minister who got angry because of some question and even because of some image of those tragic days that was put on the screen while he was speaking. Cavallo believed that he judged him too harshly.

But strange winds blow in Argentina at this time. Perhaps the repetition of inflationary episodes in recent years and the economic collapse that has not found a floor have made Cavallo one of the most consulted economists now that it is being discussed whether a shock plan or the magic of dollarization are adequate tools to find quick a solution. Cavallo doesn’t even get mad at journalists anymore.

On Friday, for example, a while after Alberto Fernández abandoned the utopia of re-election and the dollar passed 440 pesos, Cavallo explained the errors of the current government on Continental radio with educational serenity.

He repeated the same thing on Sunday night, in the good program that the psychologist Diego Sheikman hosts on TN Noticias. A kind and rational Cavallo explained the adjustments that the Argentine economy needed before a new government could successfully attempt a dollarization plan. And he was even encouraged to recommend the economists from Together for Change and those who accompany Javier Milei to meet to exchange ideas.

It is that there have been so many errors in these forty years of democracy that there are no successful economists among those who have gone through the public service. At 76, Cavallo gives advice as if the corralito had been a find in the real economy. And they explain how to save us from wild inflation Nicolás Dujovne or Martín Guzmán. Argentina is an extraordinary land.

Now it is Sergio Massa who is going through that laboratory of failure that is the Ministry of Economy. Last week he faced the first major currency run of his administration and, in forty-eight hours, he produced two very high-impact political events. He had the presidential adviser, businessman Antonio Aracre, thrown out, whom he blamed for spreading a plan to devalue the peso and freeze prices. And he joined forces with Cristina to force the end of the re-election plan with which Fernández threatened. The operation “Alberto is already”, as the trade unionist Hugo Yasky baptized it, already in prophetic mode of Christianity.

The problem for Massa was that the dollar did not fall and the market did not calm down despite the fact that the video with Alberto’s electoral farewell was broadcast seven minutes before the opening of the banks. The situation is far from under control. For the Minister of Economy, this Monday will be a very tough exam day and this week it will finish defining whether he can be (or not) the presidential candidate of the Frente de Todos. He must show if he can stop the dollar from rising and inflation. As simple as that.

During the weekend, Massa maintained the hyperactivity that is his attitude towards life. He spoke with other ministers, with leaders of Peronism, with business friends and even with US officials who are committed to his continuity. He told everyone more or less the same thing.: that is going to stop the currency run; that he is going to get US$ 1,000 million in liquidation with the dubious Soybean Plan 3; that he is going to get another 500 million from the oil company Chevrón; another 680 million from the Anfina Development Corporation and that will compensate the losses of the drought with the disbursement that the IMF is going to make in June for US$ 5,400 million. The minister does the sum without ever losing his conviction and keeps his Chinese dishes in the air.

Through another smartphone, Massa activates his press team and disseminates the statements of the Argentine director before the IMF, the lawyer Sergio Chodos, a master at Columbia like Martín Guzmán. He is a civil servant who worked for US studios in the ’90s (Shearman & Sterling, in New York; and Morrison & Forster, in Washington); that he came to public office with Roberto Lavagna in the government of Néstor Kirchner and that on Sunday he debuted the obsolete adjective of “unpatria”.

He used it when accusing, without naming them, but providing coded data to identify three opposition economists. Massa thus targeted former ministers Alfonso Prat-Gay and Hernán Lacunza, and the former head of the Central Bank, Guido Sandleris. All of them were civil servants during the government of Mauricio Macri.

Massa knows that with this blank ammunition he can do little to improve his situation in the financial markets, but it is a simulation that seeks to keep his Kirchner associates calm. It is that nothing beats the 31 votes of K deputies against the agreement that Guzmán closed, or the parliamentary approval of the pension moratorium that Máximo Kirchner pushed, as a motor of the Fund’s mistrust.

Now there are no excuses for the Minister of Economy. There are three tables in which Massa takes the exam. From this Monday before the markets; day by day before society with the inflation numbers and in this defining week before Cristina’s electoral board. The Vice President supported her entry into the Government with the expectation that he would end up being the candidate for president.

But that experiment has been left adrift with the crazy rise in inflation. Destroyed Alberto Fernández’s attempt to compete for re-election, Cristina Kirchner is still betting on keeping her finger as the great computer of the candidacies in Peronism. And she will give Massa one last chance to fix some of the economic variables so that he remains the presidential candidate without discussion.

Since the economic debacle of Martín Guzmán and Silvina Batakis, Cristina began to develop her electoral salvation strategy, building the refuge of the province of Buenos Aires in the face of the increasingly close possibility of a shocking defeat at the national level. The idea was always that of a sheet ballot in which Massa was the candidate for president; with Axel Kicillof competing for re-election to governor and reserving the alternative of going as a candidate for senator. As in 2017, it is the ideal space to maintain a share of power in Congress and parliamentary privileges to protect themselves from a judicial sentence of six years in prison for corruption in the Highway case.

The big question mark for Cristina’s strategy is whether she will be able to support Massa as a candidate in the event that the economic and financial crisis does not abate. On Thursday, the Vice President will speak at an event in La Plata and give some indication of her future steps. Her son, Máximo Kirchner, spoke this weekend of a “consensus candidate.” It is clear that the finger is not negotiated.

The alternative plan is Daniel Scioli, always active from the embassy in Brazil and the first to launch his presidential candidacy in the midst of the storm under the auspices of Alberto. But he also understands the game of Peronism and has begun to activate his forgotten connections with Kirchnerism.

This week he was photographed with the mayor of Quilmes, the camper Mayra Mendoza, and on Tuesday he will receive Kicillof in Brasilia. With strength, with optimism and also with a careful management of the opportunity. Scioli, who has among his enthusiastic allies the Albertista piquetero movements, understands that Cristina’s finger continues to have more influence in Peronism than the competitive tool of the PASO.

In almost eighty years of history, Peronism has withstood many adversities in order to survive. It is a movement that survived two coups and the ban of its founder. That it overcame an internal war between several of its factions, which was settled with bullets and left hundreds dead. And that he maintained electoral competitiveness by giving birth to a president from the right (Carlos Menem) and two from the left (Néstor and Cristina Kirchner). One privatized companies and the others nationalized them. There were even Peronists, like Oscar Parrilli, who actively participated in the two processes. And without blushing.

So much resilience, however, has not been enough for Peronism to overcome the Stockholm Syndrome that has it clinging to Cristina’s leadership. None of her governors, nor her legislators, have managed to gather enough courage to face her. And everything indicates that it will be, once again, the finger of the Vice President who points the direction and the name of the candidates to travel a path that smells of defeat.

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