For Carlos Pagni 1 Too many electoral results are described as earthquakes when in reality they are little more than mild tremors, but the self-described anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei’s victory in the second and deciding round of Argentina’s presidential election over Sergio Massa, the sitting minister of the economy in the former Peronist government, who in the eyes of many Argentines across the political spectrum has wielded far more power than the country’s president, Alberto Fernández, truly does represent a seismic shift in Argentine politics, the radical untuning of its political sky. On this, ardent pro-Peronists such as Horacio Verbitsky, editor of the left online magazine El Cohete a la Luna, and some of Peronism’s most perceptive and incisive critics, notably the historian Carlos Pagni – people who agree on virtually nothing else – find themselves in complete accord. “Demographically and generationally,” Verbitsky wrote, “a new political period is beginning in [Argentina].” For his part, Pagni compared the situation in which Argentina now finds itself, to “the proverbial terra incognita beloved of medieval cartographers,” and “heading down a path it had never before explored” — a new era in Argentine political history. The country’s disastrous economic and social situation was the work of successive governments, but above all its last two – the center-right administration of Mauricio Macri between 2015 and 2019, and the Peronist restoration in the form of Alberto Fernández´s government between 2019 and 2023, in which Fernández was forced for all intents and purposes to share power with his vice-president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who had been Macri´s predecessor as president for two successive terms, from 2007 to 2015, having succeeded her husband Néstor, who was president between 2003 and 2007. Cristina (virtually every Argentine refers to her by her first name) remains — for the moment, at least — Peronism´s dominant figure. Despite some success during the first two years of his administration, Macri proved incapable of either sustainably mastering inflation or of stimulating high enough levels of international direct investment in Argentina. Cristina had left office with inflation running at twenty-five percent annually. Under Macri’s administration, that figure doubled to fifty percent, a level not seen in the country for the previous twenty years, and the key reason why Macri failed to win reelection in 2019. But during his four years in office, Alberto Fernández accomplished the seemingly impossible: making his predecessor´s failure seem almost benign. The legacy that he has left to Milei — unlike Macri, he knew better than to seek reelection — is an inflation rate of one hundred and forty-two percent, nearly three times higher than under Macri. It is not that Argentina had not suffered through terrible economic crises before. Three of them were even more severe than the present one. The first of these was the so-called Rodrigazo of 1975 (the name derives from then President Isabel Perón’s minister of the economy, Celestin Rodrigo), when inflation jumped from twenty-four percent to one hundred and eighty-two percent in a year. The Rodrigazo was not the main cause of the coup the following year that overthrew Isabel Perón and ushered in eight years of bestial military dictatorship, but the panic and disorientation that it created in Argentine society certainly played a role. The second was the hyperinflation of 1989, during the Radical Party’s leader Raúl Alfonsín’s second term as president. Alfonsín, who was the first democratically elected president after the end of military rule in 1983, is generally regarded in Argentina, even by Peronists, as having impeccable democratic credentials, although Milei has rejected this portrayal, instead calling him an “authoritarian” and a “swindler” whose hyperinflation amounted to robbery of the Argentine people. The last and by far the worst was the economic and financial crisis of 2001-2002, which saw Argentina default on virtually all its foreign debt and brought it to the brink of social collapse. There was widespread popular repudiation of the entire political establishment, exemplified by the slogan, “Que se vayan todos,” “they must all go.” Milei own promise in the 2023 campaign to get rid of what he calls La Casta, and by which he means the entire political class, resurrects that anti-elitist revulsion in the service of the populist right rather than the populist left that took to the streets in 2001. But in 2001, there was finally no social collapse (even though Argentina had five presidents in a period of two weeks). That the country would weather the storm was anything but clear at the time. That it did so at all, as Pablo Grechunoff, one of Argentina’s most distinguished economic historians and himself no Peronist, was Néstor and Cristina Kirchner´s great accomplishment. (They were always a team politically, rather like Bill and Hillary Clinton.) The Kirchners, Gerchunoff has written, were not only able to “contain the social and political bloodbath [that had occurred] in 2001,” but also managed to “reconstitute both presidential authority and a [functioning] political system.” On the economic front, even most of the Kirchners’ anti-Peronist critics — except the contrarian Milei, of course — find it hard to deny that during Néstor’s presidency and Cristina’s first term in office the Argentine economy made a powerful recovery. To be sure, these critics are also quick to point out that this recovery was not only fueled in large measure fueled by the huge spike in world commodity prices — “a gift from heaven” is the way Gerchunoff has described it — but also by the fact that Néstor´s predecessor as president, Eduardo Duhalde, had instituted a series of harsh economic measures, including a brutal devaluation of the currency, and so he had a freedom of maneuver enjoyed by few Argentine presidents before or since to refloat the Argentine economy and vastly increase welfare payments and other forms of social assistance for the poorest Argentines. It is this seemingly cyclical character of Argentina’s economic crises — “Boom and recession. Stop and go. Go and crash. Hope and disappointment,¨ as Gerchunoff summarizes it
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