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Right, left or center? The political movement which has dominated Argentine political life for more than 70 years and returns to power today with Alberto Fernández is made up of various currents which claim the same social commitment and generally silence their differences as the electoral deadlines approach.
From our correspondent in Buenos Aires,
The new Argentine president, Alberto Fernández , who took office on Tuesday, December 10, is often presented in the international media as a "leftist Peronist". This does not fail to surprise his compatriots, for whom Fernández is rather a peronist on the right who has approached the center, a moderate, but in any case not a man on the left!
In fact, this 60-year-old lawyer and law professor began his political career in the 1990s working with the Peronist (right) governor of the province of Buenos Aires Eduardo Duhalde, before being elected legislator of the city in 2000. federal capital on a list headed by Domingo Cavallo, former ultra-liberal Minister of the Economy of the Peronist President (right) Carlos Menem. And, the capital having always been hostile to Peronism, Fernández then sought to get closer to a businessman who, taking advantage of his success at the head of one of the most important football clubs in the country, Boca Juniors, had decided to create a new party. But the latter ignores it. It was… Mauricio Macri, who would become president in 2015 and to which Alberto Fernández succeeds today. Revenge.
Retrieved by Néstor Kirchner
Then rejected by Macri, Fernández is recovered by Néstor Kirchner, governor of Santa Cruz, a distant province of Patagonia, whose candidacy he supports for the presidency. Elected in May 2003 with only 22.5% of the vote in a country still in crisis, Kirchner called upon him for his contacts in Buenos Aires, his negotiating skills and his moderation. He entrusted him with the post of head of the cabinet of ministers and coordinating minister of government action (less than a French Prime Minister, but much more than a simple chief of cabinet: he is the prime minister), a position he will continue to hold after the election of Cristina Kirchner as president in 2007.
He will resign after seven months, in disagreement with the increase in taxes on agricultural exports, a measure that triggers the anger of producers and then divides society. He then moves away from the president, whom he will not stop criticizing until the end of his second mandate (2015), before coming to terms with her in 2018 and that, against all expectations, in April 2019, he designates him as a presidential candidate in his place. Nothing, a priori, in this journey that allows us to affirm that Fernández is on the left, as foreign observers willingly do. Except that he was one of the governments of the Kirchners who, for their part, claimed this designation, not without some reason (although that can be discussed). And that he was elected with Cristina Kirchner as running mate.
Complexity as a trademark
In any case, this brief reminder of the career of the current president of Argentina shows the difficulty of situating Peronism, this movement which has dominated the political life of his country for over 70 years: from the right with Menem or Duhalde, on the left with Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, he is centrist with Alberto Fernández, himself at the head of a coalition government between ... different Peronist currents! A complexity that has been its hallmark since its birth in 1945, when socialists, unionists and nationalist officers united to form, under the aegis of General Juan Perón, then Secretary of State for Labor of a military government, a Labor Party (today "justicialist", that's its real name).
Driven by the favorable reforms for the workers he had put in place and the promise to amplify them, Perón won the presidential election of 1946 against a coalition ranging from conservatives to communists. Re-elected in 1952, Perón was ousted from power by a coup in 1955, after having made a policy very favorable to the workers and relying in particular on the unions. In terms of social progress (minimum wage, collective agreements, 13th month, paid holidays, etc.), this first Peronism which gives working people the benefit of a real welfare state, is for Argentina the equivalent of the Popular Front by Léon Blum for France.
But in foreign policy, it is rather de Gaulle: Perón develops and applies the so-called "third position" doctrine, and the country does not align with either of the two blocs. The movement has many faces, within it coexist several currents, Perón arbitrates. Subsequently, Peronism will always have a right and a left, sometimes even an extreme right and an extreme left (as in the 1970s, when they settled their scores with the machine gun), the leader's arbitration generally being done In the center. But sometimes also on the right (Menem) or on the left (Kirchner).
The influence of the Catholic Church
In reality, the heart of Peronism is a social commitment, very Christian-democratic and marked from the outset by the influence of the Catholic Church. In fact, Jorge Bergoglio, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires elected pope in 2013 under the name of François is a Peronist (he is also the author of a social doctrine called "of the people", adopted by Latin American Catholicism and today broadcast from the Vatican, which is a kind of Peronism purified and theorized in the light of faith).
In any case, it is this priority displayed (but not always given) to social issues that unites the different currents of the movement, as well as a great pragmatism, which facilitates internal alliances and the constitution of fronts with other forces during electoral deadlines. Beyond the differences between them, the Peronists share a culture which favors the unity of the movement in order to conquer and assume power. This makes Peronism a formidable electoral and government machine, very difficult to beat.
Except when he broke up, as was the case in 2015: if Macri then won the presidential election at the head of a coalition bringing together liberals and social democrats, it is also because many right-wing and moderate Peronists (like Fernández), tired of the authoritarianism of Cristina Kirchner, did not want to follow the Kirchnerist candidate. And the intelligence of Cristina Kirchner this year was to give up her candidacy (which would have perpetuated the divisions and favored the re-election of Macri) and, by choosing Alberto Fernández, to allow the reunification of the Peronist family and, helping economic crisis, victory in the elections.
All the currents represented
It is therefore a Peronist coalition which is in power today, as reflected by the government formed by Fernández, where all the currents are represented. If the kirchnéristes are allocated Interior, Defense, Environment and the key post of Attorney General of the Nation, the followers of the vice-president do not dominate the cabinet, where also find their place of traditional Peronists, rather conservatives, as are some governors, liberals linked to Sergio Massa, now president of the Chamber of Deputies, and, of course, a number of moderates close to the president.
Dosage also between figures of weight, who were part of previous governments, and ministers without experience, but with recognized skills. And surprise with regard to the most awaited Minister, that of the Economy. Fernández's choice fell on Martín Guzmán, a 37-year-old economist with no political background. A professor at Columbia University in the United States, he is close to the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, and like the latter a non-Orthodox. But apparently reasonable enough to be able to avoid default and renegotiate the debt schedule with the IMF and with private creditors.
" Incorrigibles"
In the Argentine system, the president has a lot of power and the vice-presidency is generally entrusted to a second-rate personality. This time, the situation is unprecedented, since it was Cristina Kirchner who dubbed Fernández and that she remains the most popular Peronist leader. But for the moment, it does not seem that she seeks to destabilize the president, despite the power she holds in Parliament (she chairs the Senate and her son Máximo the parliamentary group of the majority in the Chamber of Deputies). And why would she try to do it? For many, what she wanted with the vice-presidency was to escape a possible conviction for corruption in the judicial cases concerning her.
It seems that we are taking the way. After all, perhaps, as the great writer Jorge Luis Borges said, humiliated by Perón, who had removed him from his post as director of the National Library to appoint him poultry inspector in Buenos Aires, " the Peronists did not are neither right nor left, but incorrigible ”.