Alberto F. during the announcement of the extension of the quarantine / Télam
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MWhile the covers of the newspapers are reiterated with the news of the quarantine, with good reason because the population has been locked up 100 days ago by the coronavirus pandemic, there is a shift of the leadership towards the center of the political arc. The most evident image is that of Alberto Fernández who tries to position himself as a mediator between Axel Kicillof and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, a role that the PRO does not assign to him.
Congress in recent days offered an example of this situation. On the one hand, Vice President Cristina Kirchner hastened in the Senate the creation of a bicameral commission to investigate the credit relationship of the agro-exporter Vicentin with Banco Nación, forcing the vote on a law without political consensus; on the other, the deputy Máximo Kirchner negotiated with the opposition a project of his own to encourage the donation of plasma from patients recovered from COVID-19.
The head of the Everyone’s Front bloc in the lower house agreed to support the initiative – which was later unanimously voted – with his PRO colleague Cristian Ritondo. Until a few months ago, the dialogue between a pure kirchnerista and a macrista of the first hour would have been a work of science fiction, but the Lower House is lavish in this type of political contacts, which often do not come to light. The line that Emilio Monzó cultivated is now followed by Sergio Massa.
Máximo was in 2019 one of the promoters of the candidacy of Alberto F. The thesis that prevailed in Kirchnerism was that Cristina could not synthesize an alternative proposal to that of Mauricio Macri, because she would not get the support of moderate sectors. The boss of La Cámpora continues on that same path, as this week showed. Ritondo, meanwhile, remains a bishop of María Eugenia Vidal and by extension Larreta, who aspires to take Macri’s leadership.
Larreta, Vidal, Monzó and the Buenosairean senator Martín Lousteau advance in the armed of a centrist line within the opposition, that does not agree with the directives that Macri lowers from the fifth Los Abrojos and that are expressed in the later declarations of Patricia Bullrich and Miguel Ángel Pichetto. The former candidate for Vice President obtained his appointment as Auditor General of the Nation, but the pro-government deputies abstained: they do not forgive him for his alliance with Macri.
BEFORE CRISTINA, NOW MACRI
The former president fears there is a plan to put him in jail. The search of the home of Darío Nieto, who was his private secretary at the Casa Rosada, alerted Macrismo amid revelations of the cause that investigates the illegal espionage of politicians, businessmen and unionists between 2015 and 2019. It is coming now a legal battle for the jurisdiction of the case, which is carried out in Lomas de Zamora by the federal judge Villenas but which Comodoro Py eagerly claims.
Macri and Cristina continue to represent the opposite poles of Argentine politics. The former president has just signed a petition requesting the removal of the quarantine, while the Vice maintains a strict silence on the pandemic. A custom that has remained unchanged since its rise to power is not to talk about issues associated with the tragedy: it already happened with the Cromañón fire in 2004 and with the train crash of Once in 2012. The same silence maintains Massa.
The difference in criteria between Cristina and Massa for the possible expropriation of Vicentin is also expressed in silence. The judicial setback of the plan of the governor of Santa Fe, Omar Perotti, so that the intervention of the company is part of the bankruptcy, puts the hot coal back in the hands of Alberto F., who had to face very strong protests inside the country. He even had to suspend a visit to Rosario to commemorate Flag Day.
But this week he could suspend the recommendation of the Presidential Medical Unit to maintain his seclusion in the Olivos farm and land in Chaco, which has become a focus of contagion for COVID-19. Alberto F. remains convinced that quarantine is the remedy to prevent the collapse of the health system.
FREE FALL ECONOMY
Worrying economic indicators are on the other side of the quarantine coin. INDEC confirmed an increase in unemployment of the economically active population in the first quarter of the year, prior to the paralysis that forced compulsory isolation. It also reported a 5.4% drop in the level of activity, which according to specialists, would sharply sharpen in the second quarter, in a negative band of 12% to 20%.
The primary deficit of the public sector exceeded 250,000 million pesos in May and alarm lights went on in the government, because it financed 44% of spending with monetary issuance and knows that it will not be able to keep it at the same rate. The delay in the closing of the negotiations for the external debt does not contribute to generating certainty: the talks of Minister Martín Guzmán are linked to the BlackRock fund, which is very influential in the global financial market.
But the differences are not only economic and legal, but also political: Alberto F. promoted Gustavo Beliz’s candidacy to preside over the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Argentina was in a minority along with Mexico and Venezuela, because Donald Trump came out cross with your own applicant. It is already known that international alliances carve in this type of negotiations and that the North American Treasury Secretariat is able to tip the balance.
Beliz’s candidacy continues to stand, but judging by Trump’s position, a more senior Cabinet position is more likely to await him when the pandemic subsides. Will Alberto F. try to convince Roberto Lavagna to join the Government?
These are questions that arise among leaders of the Front of All who, although they argue that the President had (bad) luck to govern in the midst of a pandemic, in reserved conversations they admit their concern about what they judge as a tendency to government inaction. Until now, Alberto F.’s attempt to initiate a post-pandemic agenda has been unsuccessful, because the theme chosen was the controversial “rescue” of Vicentin.
It would be more useful for the Government to focus on the design of a plan that, at this stage of the circumstances, would have to be thought plain and simple as the reconstruction of a devastated economy.
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