Asking for the impossible

Ever since taking office in late 2019, the government whose figurehead is Alberto Fernández has been pestered by people who want to know exactly what it proposes to do to make Argentina’s broken-down economy roadworthy. For a while, they let themselves be fobbed off by being told that as Mauricio Macri was to blame for everything bad, replacing him with someone as moderate, sensible and kind-hearted as Alberto would be more than enough to put things right. However, although official spokesmen have continued to go on and on about the dreadful state of what they “inherited” from the former administration, they have yet to come up with anything resembling a plan.

Does this mean they do not have one? Alberto assured the Financial Times he was against plans on principle, perhaps because he thought Anglo-saxon “neoliberals” despised them, but since then he seems to have changed his mind, so along with his Economy Minister Martín Guzmán and others who have a say in these matters, he insists that, like every self-respecting government, his really does have a detailed plan which it is busily applying, but he would rather not tell the rest of the world what is in it. As nobody takes such obfuscations seriously, both here and abroad the consensus is that the people in government have no clear idea about what to do and are simply playing it by ear in the hope that, somehow or other, everything will work out well in the end.

There can be little doubt that those who suspect that Alberto and Guzmán do not have anything approaching a plan are right. They have no intention of coming up with one because Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her pet ideologues are nervously aware that anything plausible would frighten almost everybody, because the men and women charged with drawing it up would have to take into account the sad fact that the country is effectively bankrupt.

The government’s brighter members must know that apart from the much reviled International Monetary Fund and the farmers Kirchnerites detest, the only reliable source of income they have left is the printing press, which fuels inflation, that the tax burden is already so heavy it is crushing whatever productive activities still remain and that, while soybeans now and, perhaps, lithium and shale gas tomorrow, may provide a little extra, it will not be enough to satisfy the demands of those who are competing desperately for bigger slices of a rapidly shrinking pie, but they are unwilling to risk their jobs by defying Cristina.

As was always bound to happen, influential foreigners who would like to see Argentina recover from her many self-inflicted wounds and, at long last, become an upstanding fee-paying member of the so-called “international community,” are getting more impatient by the day. Last week, the Deputy Secretary of the US Treasury Wally Adeyemo promised that Joe Biden’s administration would give Alberto’s team its full backing once it showed it a “strong economic policy framework,” by which he meant a plan. For some time now, IMF technocrats have been saying much the same, as have the Paris Club creditors led by the Germans and Japanese.

They are asking for the moon. Argentina’s government cannot say what it intends to do put the economy in working order, let alone draft a market-friendly plan, because even if it tries to buy time by nationalising everything in sight in a last-ditch effort to get its hands on more hard cash, sooner or later it will have to slash public spending to the bone, something it is most reluctant to do because it would then have to deal with the consequences, which could be most unpleasant. For a government that owes its very existence to the appealing notion that there is more than enough money available so it can give some to the poor, austerity is simply not an option. In the official view, belt-tightening is a “neo-liberal” vice.

The Kirchnerites who, with the acquiescence of supposedly more level-headed Peronists, dominate the government. would much rather be in charge of a country with plenty of money than one which is deep in hock and, as stern economists are fond of reminding us, has been living beyond its means for decades, so they pretend this is not really the case and behave accordingly. Though it may be assumed that members of Macri’s government were well aware that, when they took office, Argentina’s economy was in danger of falling over a cliff, they too made out that a few minor adjustments would be enough to put it on a road leading straight to development. In retrospect, they made a big mistake when they tried to persuade investors that by and large the economy was in better shape than at the time most outside observers thought, but they had good reason to fear that any attempt to do what the financial hawks among them wanted would have been met with large-scale riots followed by their downfall.

When Cristina’s second term was approaching its end, she and her then-economy minister, Axel Kiciloff, went about setting a trap for whoever came first in the upcoming elections, even if it happened to be Daniel Scioli; as far as they were concerned, the government’s own candidate was a hateful right-winger. The idea was that they would benefit by forcing the next president to choose between making an allout effort to reduce the fiscal deficit or get battered by hyperinflation. However, despite their best efforts, Macri did manage to complete his four-year stint in office, leaving Cristina’s stand-in, Alberto, to face the same alternatives. One might say that the Kirchnerites have been hoist with their own petard.

Once populism (which can be taken to mean economic policies designed to give people what they want immediately without worrying about the long-term or even medium-term consequences of institutionalising the many entitlements this implies) is established in a country, removing it becomes progressively more difficult. Juan Domingo Perón himself learned this when he sought to bring to an end the spending spree which, several years earlier, had won him the lasting gratitude of a sizeable proportion of the country’s inhabitants.

Ever since then, many governments, including several military dictatorships, have tried to slow down the widening gap between what people demanded and what the public sector could really afford without daring to do what toughminded economists recommended. Most plugged the gap by printing money and borrowing as much as possible. In the 1990s, Carlos Menem’s government came close to curing the country of the populist disease, but by failing to take proper advantage of the stability which for a while was made possible by Domingo Cavallo’s currency board arrangement, it merely ensured that things would continue to go from bad to worse, which is why Argentina is where she is today.

There can be little doubt that those who suspect that Alberto Fernández and Martín Guzmán do not have anything approaching an economic plan are right.

The rumour mill is working at full speed these days, and don’t expect it to die down. Elections are around the corner.

Aseries of sexual rumours about Argentina’s major political characters has been circulating for a while now, and it has only penetrated deeper into the so-called ‘collective subconscious’ as time passes and we travel deeper into the deep woods that is the electoral season. These unfounded and unverified claims spread from President Alberto Fernández to the opposition’s main man, Buenos Aires City Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta. They include former President Mauricio Macri and in the not too distant past involved Cristina Fernádez de Kirchner. While political rumours are a thing of times immemorial, and the alleged sexual varieties are of the strongest type, the prevalence of digital means of communication and news consumption have quickly distorted and amplified them, making them potential ticking timebombs. At the same time, the use of social media and other platforms have also sown a new generation of conspiracy theories and misinformation that can have very real impacts on social perceptions and electoral results.

Back in 2019, when Alberto had just been fingerpicked by Fernández de Kirchner to lead the pan-peronist ticket that sought to oust Macri, the then-candidate was singled out for supposedly causing a very public separation. Viviana Canosa, a gossip journalist who had just returned to TV with a political show, had recently made public news of her separation from Clarín’s political humorist, Alejandro Borensztein. She was immediately linked to Alberto. The journalist dismissed it and spoke of a smear campaign pointing to a digital “troll, with four followers.” Since then, the rumor mill has targeted the president as a womaniser, despite his public relationship with First Lady Fabiola Yáñez and the level of exposure he’s exposed to, a fact that would make it it quite difficult to keep affairs hidden behind closed doors.

What exactly is the purpose of said rumours, which, beyond their veracity, have a very real impact on public perceptions? There’s a good amount of literature on the political use of rumours, and there’s a new realm that investigates the emergence of social media and digital platforms with regards to the spread of misinformation. In a paper titled “A War of (Mis) Information: The Political Effects of Rumors and Rumor Rebuttals in an Authoritarian Country” (2015), political science professor Haifeng Huang from the University of California, Merced, indicated that such slanders decrease citizens’ trust in governments. They permeated throughout socio-economic and political backgrounds, and their impact persisted beyond rebuttals, which reduced belief in the specific piece of content but did not rebuild trust.

Bringing the concepts forward Soo Young Bae, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Communications, analysed the impact of social media on the issue. Her paper, “The social mediation of political rumors: Examining the dynamics in social media and belief in political rumors” (2017), noted the connection between people’s reliance on social media for news consumption and their belief in political slurs. These are impacted and exacerbated by the network characteristics of social media in the construction of beliefs around said political rumors. If we consider that studies in the US by the Pew Research Center have shown that 71 percent of people get their news from social platforms, the field is ripe for manipulation.

Bringing it back to the Argentine political arena, it is unclear whether rumours are being used to harm a certain actor, or even be used for their benefit. Claims can also be used to distract attention from other issues, both to the benefit or harm of different political actors. The more personal and salacious, the better.

Late last year, Rodríguez Larreta’s break-up with his wife, celebrity wedding planner Bárbara Diez, surprised much of the establishment. The official story was that the intensity of his political work as mayor and as a potential 2023 presidential candidate had strained their relationship, yet quickly the rumour mill began turning and claims of an extramarital relationship began circulating. Newsmagazine Noticias investigated the issue, indicating the involvement of intelligence agencies under the ring of illegal espionage that snooped into both allies and enemies of the Macri administration. “In their reports, agents mentioned an affair between the City mayor and a community leader,” read the piece by journalist Rodis Recalt, who inquired and received a firm denial from Larreta’s inner circle.

Interestingly, it isn’t entirely clear whether this ‘attack’ on the most important figure of the opposing Juntos por el Cambio coalition is an external or domestic threat. There’s a ferocious battle within the opposition between hardliners close to Macri, represented publicly by Patricia Bullrich, and consensus-seekers aligned with Rodríguez Larreta and María Eugenia Vidal. What is clear is that whether or not these rumours are true, the intention to put them on the agenda from certain sectors has the clear desire of trying to push the public towards a certain viewpoint.

Within this dirty political world of tricks, where it isn’t clear if rumours are meant to hurt or aggrandise a certain actor, or if they are released into the wild by colleagues or adversaries, there’s an intentional use of stories tied to sexuality. But this isn’t new. Roman general Julius Caesar was a prime example, as Kelly Olson of the University of Western Ontario wrote in her paper “Masculinity, Appearance, and Sexuality: Dandies in Roman Antiquity” (2014). Citing Suetonius, she notes Caesar “was somewhat overnice in the care of his person,” while Plutarch spoke of how well-known his sexual proclivities were. Caesar used all of the means of communication at hand to project the image of an alpha male, using it to political advantage. On the flip side, already in the Roman Empire, Caligula’s depravity and sexual thirst had been used by his rivals to paint him as a madman and was ultimately murdered and overthrown.

The rumour mill is working at full speed these days, and don’t expect it to die down. Elections are around the corner.