In the last chance saloon
Alberto Fernández is an opportunist who climbed to the top of the greasy pole of politics by pretending to be whatever potentially useful people wanted him to be. That was easy enough for someone like him when it looked as though Argentina would remain much as it had been for many years, with a strong Peronist movement with few ethical scruples lined up against a gaggle of less populist groupings that prided themselves on their adherence to republican virtues, but then things started coming apart.
Suddenly, Alberto found himself obliged to make some difficult choices. Like a chameleon trapped in a disco where the lights keep changing colour, to the bewilderment of onlookers he is doing his best to react as required, going green one moment and pale blue, or bright red, the next. After pretending to be a diehard Kirchnerite in rebellion against an allegedly rigged judicial system, he morphs into the law professor who would never dream of defying the Supreme Court. It is all very confusing.
Unfortunately for Alberto, reconciling his duties as a loyal servant of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner with his role as president of a country sliding into disarray dragged down by a broken economy his government cannot repair is proving anything but easy. To please his patroness, he must tell her that she is entitled to overlook laws that get in her way. This makes him nervous; among other things, helping her thwart justice could land him in jail when another government is in office and more judges feel free to treat errant politicians as they would ordinary folk charged with committing serious crimes. He also likes to boast that, as the adopted son of a judge, he would never dream of doing anything that might have met with his disapproval.
Last week Alberto did his best to have it both ways. After letting himself be inveigled by Cristina and a bevy of provincial governors who depend on federal funds into brushing aside a Supreme Court ruling ordering the Executive to give Mauricio Macri’s stronghold, Buenos Aires City, a large sum of money he took from it a couple of years ago to give to the neighbouring province of the same name which, as luck would have it, is run by a Kirchnerite, Axel Kiciloff, he quickly backtracked but said he would pay what was owed in bonds, not in hard cash as the judges had explicitly said.
Though nobody knows how this ongoing kerfuffle will end, there can be no doubt that Alberto will be among the losers. Even his few remaining loyalists have been left scratching their heads in dismay by his toing and froing in an effort to appease Cristina without colliding with what, after all, is the law of the land. Most of them want their man to go back to what he was before the Circe from Patagonia cast a spell on him to transform him from a hot-blooded critic of her behaviour into a humble creature happy to cater to her every whim, but as things stand, the chances of this happening appear to be remote. The previous version of the president can often be seen and heard on television, his successor treats him as a fake.
Cristina chose Alberto because she feared that if she ran for president in 2019 she would in all likelihood be beaten by Macri, so her junior partner had to make people think that, once ensconced in the Pink House, he would be the one calling the shots. Though she knew perfectly well that an individual who, after attacking her and all her works with abandon for years, could suddenly do a U-turn in order to become president, would be most unlikely to try to wriggle free from her tutelage, she must have thought he would at least be strong enough to defend her against the prosecutors and judges that took a dim view of the flagrant corruption that has characterized her political career.
For Alberto to fulfil his part of the bargain the two struck, he would have to demolish the constitutional order but, despite his willingness to mount fierce rhetorical attacks against it, so far he has done little else, presumably because he, along with everyone else, is well aware that the Peronist coalition he formally leads looks doomed to be massacred in the upcoming elections. Even for a person like him, such a grim prospect can help concentrate the mind.
Cristina’s latest ploy is to make out that an evil judicial system bars her from running for president next year, the implication being that, were she to do so, she would be certain to win by a sizable margin. This is not what the opinion polls suggest. They regularly give her less than a third of the votes and there are signs that the number is rapidly diminishing. To make her situation even worse, she knows it would be useless for her to lend her support to someone who, like Alberto, would promise to give her a modicum of protection against the law, because despite everything she is still more popular than any of her protégés, such as Kiciloff and her son Máximo, and her potential allies among the Peronists, many of whom dislike her intensely and would look the other way if she were handcuffed and taken to jail. The consensus is that any Kirchnerite candidate would be hard pushed to do better than Javier Milei and, if the differences between the votes won by the candidates were small, reach the run-off stage. Until Alberto muddied the waters, it looks as though Argentina had become a battleground with the Executive Branch formally squaring off against the Judiciary. Many opposition leaders, led by the habitually emollient Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, are determined to ensure that the fight continues in earnest, but the government’s decision to give Buenos Aires City bonds rather than banknotes and then throwing a tantrum does not challenge the constitutional order, as would have a blank refusal to accept the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Nonetheless, even if, for now at any rate, a straightforward conflict of powers has been averted, much damage was done to Argentina’s already unappealing international reputation. As Sergio Massa soon realised, a country whose government makes a show of its utter contempt for the law as represented by the Supreme Court will not be regarded as a good place in which to invest money. Just how much Alberto’s grandstanding, followed by a hasty retreat, has cost the economy is impossible to calculate, but in a situation as dire as the current one, even the loss of a small amount of money could have a big impact.
As Sergio Massa soon realised, a country whose government makes a show of its utter contempt for the law as represented by the Supreme Court will not be regarded as a good place in which to invest money.