Alberto Fernández will today become president of the three wars. This statement would be dramatic in itself if we only counted the first two. That in the same term of government a Head of State is affected by a global pandemic and a war on the verge of escalating planetary form would already be an extraordinary situation. But neither do these two events allow the Argentine president to fully embody his own tragedy. Now, with the total frivolization of the term, in the midst of an unstoppable inflationary crisis, declaring war on inflation has become a rhetorical resource of bad taste, or directly the laughing stock of all.
Only yesterday, ironically on various television signals - from totally opposite approaches to reality - coverage of the Ukrainian war and a countdown clock to the president's figurative war on prices persisted ironically. If there is something essential when it comes to high inflation, it is to tame expectations. Excess and improvisation have meant that the announcement of a plan to combat the scourge is not taken seriously even before the announcement of measures.
Just three months after taking office as president, Fernández found himself with the unprecedented fact that he could define his destiny as president: a global pandemic as never known in history, which led him to declare war on an invisible enemy, and to achieve consensus and credibility amid the situation of uncertainty and fear to take action exceptional ones that went beyond any guarantee of individual freedoms.
Never did a context allow democratic presidents so much as the plague of COVID-19. Unthinkable government interventions and controls on people's personal lives and private habits were suddenly accepted in the face of the advance of a greater evil that required organization and restrictions when there was no remedy to combat it other than the medieval idea of quarantine.
The Argentine president absolutely misappropriated the popularity of extraordinary times. His own bungling caused him to lose a positive image of more than 80 percent, a record in democracy, which he had reached at the peak of that circumstance. In love with those numbers, he extended the Argentinean lockdown to the unbearable and with bad management, causing an economic disaster and abusing their power.
Then it became known that, in the midst of eternal quarantine, he held parties while people could not dismiss their dead, and that Olivos was out of control. Then the vaccines were stolen, and there was ideological speculation in favor of the Russian Sputnik, which ended up being canceled worldwide due to the barbarism of another war.
They quietly went out to warn during these hours that doses of other brands are available for those who need to travel because Putin's vaccine was left out of any possibility of approval by the World Health Organization. Paradoxes and mishaps of playing Russian roulette.
The President's Second War is the chronicle of an announced error. When there were already readiness for battle and when he should have taken the most care of ways before the United States, the primary country to obtain the approval of an agreement with the Fund, because he had veto power in his board, he went blind and crazy to meet the man who a few weeks later the world calls the “Hitler of the 21st Century”, or the new Stalin, by the scale of his war crimes.
By that time, when the Argentine president happily sat down to propose that our country, once a refuge for Nazis, should be Russia's gateway to Latin America, the world was already a war front with all the signs of illegality.
Fernpandez chose the worst time to take off from the United States. To speak ill of that country when it most needed it to one of its most fierce enemies, and that days later would be the enemy of all humanity. The disproportion in political calculation, concentrated on the childishness of staging loyalty for a Cristina Kirchner who loves autocracies and autocrats, made him leave the country in a position that is embarrassing.
As the days went by, attempts were made once again to avoid calling things by name and calling war, war, and invasion, until the carnage of human beings and necessity forced us to recognize that Russia was the aggressor country and not merely to ask with an intragable sweetener that the parties involved depose the actions undertaken as if a massacre of such proportion could be flushed out with euphemisms of the second grade of primary school.
Clearly, this government that cannot read, or write, and sometimes even speak, also had the dawn of a third world war and was left on the wrong side of history. God forbid us to beg for more.
It is in the midst of these dramas faced with opportunism and without seriousness, that the president had no better idea than to declare war against inflation. Ampulously and amid widespread concern about rising prices - especially food - he said: “On Friday, another war begins, the war against inflation.”
How to achieve the opposite of applause? Choosing what the world deplores, -a war-, to build a metaphor. Or think about the seriousness of the hour for both reasons. Such is the drama of inflation that it renewed atavistic fears of situations such as hyper or Rodrigazo, but far from seriousness, the head of state only offered the tones and nuances of a sketch by Olmedo.
Just yesterday, when he mentioned the issue, Alberto Fernández himself, did not seem to know even on the day he was living. And it wasn't another day. It was the day when the milestone of his presidency was going to take place so far: reaching agreement with the Fund. A goal that, due to its own inferiority and submission to the vice-president, took more than two years, leaving the country's economy almost lush and on the verge of bankruptcy never seen before.
Argentina fell into default nine times and out of 21 plans with the IMF did not comply with any, but it had never stopped payments to a credit agency. Getting here was more than a joke, a national embarrassment in terms of management. In the prolegomena of autumn, the country is now preparing, for the announcements of the President's third war.
This poor coast that we have become, at least has not lost the ability to take things as a joke and also laugh. Societies exercise a kind of self-defense with humor and also the most acidic of criticism. It is the President, who, in this case, should prefer seriousness rather than ridicule, and offer something more than sarasa. No joke, we are on the verge of the literal war economy, and after autumn, winter comes. Not only is a crisis of governance in the making... in fact, gas might even be lacking. There is no longer room for banalities.
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