Saving Captain Beto: what is the real war that Alberto Fernández must fight?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a novel by Czech writer Milan Kundera, is about a man and his existential doubts about life as a couple immersed in emotional conflicts. The work tells scenes from everyday life narrated around the futility of existence and the need for the eternal return for which everything experienced must be repeated eternally, only when we return it does so in a different way. If Cristina spent a little time watching in retrospect what Alberto said about her, she would choose another training session to sit on Rivadavia's armchair. The eternal return of mistakes turned a successful electoral strategy into the worst democratic government. Maximo was right. Alberto should never have been elected president and that is the war he has been facing since the political fracture that allowed him to reach Casa Rosada was exposed.

While the bloody Russian invasion massacres Ukraine, in Argentina we fail to seriously discuss the real problems that have made us the southernmost poor village in the world. A dear Spanish friend told me: “You Argentines have a great country. You insist every day on destroying it and it continues to stand.” Reason is not lacking. Especially when our president, with his usual dialectical incontinence, says very loose in body that the “war” against inflation had as its “start” date last Friday. A doubly clumsy statement, first because for a Head of State to speak of war when a bloodbath breaks out is inappropriate. Second, because he recognizes that everything they did so far was useless. With an additional aggravation: not happy with that, “Captain Beto” on the long-awaited national channel where he would declare war against inflation, could only throw the ball to the side, in a speech that tasted little, forgetting that in the last election they lost 5.2 million votes. Dady Brieva was also right when he said verbatim: “We went back to the fart.”

The real war is between Captain Beto and Queen Polenta. Made official by the verborrage of the official spokeswoman, giving a clear message that the “desplantation” was from the almost septuagenarian and stoned Queen Polenta who did not answer the phone to Captain Beto. The divorce of the Pimpinela duo from national and popular politics has no return. Alberto is playing “endurance”, taking advantage of every circumstance that comes his way to pierce his boss. He wouldn't be doing badly in his illusory plan to retire Cristina to run for office. The poor results of his government and the popular vote in 2023 are another matter, since all the measures he takes threaten his re-election dreams. The approval of the agreement with the IMF gave it a renewed air, the same thing that happened after the PASO. Now with the tactical advantage that Christianity has become an opposition and minority faction.

The lack of plan “is the plan”. It is the use of circumstances in a changing context, a scenario where the pandemic is joined by the Russian massacre in Ukraine, causing even greater uncertainty, while Alberto patiently “weaves”, making endurance an art, competing on an equal footing with Daniel Scioli (remember the stoicism with which he endured the strata by Cristina). We tend to make the mistake of believing that patience is passive, when reality indicates the opposite. Patience is an active exercise that is important to contain with a lot of effort the “desire” to break everything. An exercise that Alberto has been perfectly consummated in his plan to retire Cristina, today more concerned about Comodoro Py than with the problems that “his” government must face, from which he tries to get rid of with the aim of gathering the votes necessary to tear a post (and the always blessed forces) in 2023. Cristina's war is against the judiciary, for her Captain Beto is an accessory.

Alberto and Cristina have antagonistic interests today, the vote in rejection of the agreement with the IMF of the 13 Senators of Queen Polenta confirms this, leaving the discredited Frente de Todos adrift fought with everyone, while Sergio Massa, from the lower house acts as a buffer playing his own game.

Christianity has been reduced to a mere internal faction within a complex government with too many internal fronts. Alberto, despite Cristina, has its own relevance today within the Peronist framework, that which relies on the governors, mayors and trade unionists most closely related to the Casa Rosada, which at the same time as the camporismo seeks to retreat in the Province of Buenos Aires by clinging to the boxes of the state that they consider their own.

The rift of the ruling party ended up bringing Alberto's hosts together with a significant part of the opposition, who had no choice but to “rescue” him to prevent the institutions and the country from flying through the air, since if the agreement had not been approved, the most serious problem was not the default, but the derangement of a government unable to support itself. Without agreement, the advancement of the presidential elections was a very close possibility.

Alberto's “Zelig” style, is writing a new manual on political survival. It is called ENDURING, SWALLOWING SALIBA AND MOVING ON, while letting Christianity strike the palatial blows. Both camporism and albertism resort to the dialectical fantasy of making the dead speak. On one side and on the other side of the internal rift that grooms their government, they resort to the dialectic of “Néstor” to justify, make or make it say, what “he” would have done instead. The halo of the “Nestornauta” is as useful in justifying the agreement with the IMF as it is to repudiate it. Paradoxes of the Berreta policy that governs us by proving powerless to curb inflation. The adjustment of this government, in fact, is brutal and the people, as we know, vote with their pockets. The agreement with the IMF will set the economic course for the coming years. The president who didn't want plans now has one, which, as much as he denies it, comes with more adjustment that doesn't help him in his intentions for 2023. Alberto is also doing a crash course: How to govern without results to try to win an election.

The agreement with the IMF had an immense cost to the government by exposing its fracture, at the same time it prevented the fall of the “Fernández administration” that was knocking on the doors of the Casa Rosada. It's not enough, but it's not enough. It served to overcome a new default from the formal. In fact, the reality is quite different. It is a sweetened agreement to make the reality that we must also face a little less sour. It is clear that Cristina's ideological gene has nothing to do with the current policies of reordering a small economy, such as the one usually deployed by the weakened “Queen Polenta”. Fiscal discipline gives him allergies. Cristina, with her absence at the time of the vote, expressed her rejection of the agreement with the IMF, taking another step in her political isolation, while at the same time exhibiting greater weakness. Orthodox Peronists, like the shark, smell blood and go for the prey (the expression is worth in many more ways than the literal one).

We have to wait for Captain Beto to to finish his term in the most orderly manner possible and to guarantee the democratic transition, while the Argentines continue, meekly, waiting for the carriage to come and take us out of the bottom of the pit (the people also live with illusions, not only Alberto). Throughout this time, inflation will continue to be present and tougher than before. Argentina, in its current model fell off the globe, let's hope to find the way back to normality as quickly as possible, while Alberto and Cristina continue to play Captain Beto's war against Queen Polenta. The prize is nothing itself. They forget that in the last elections they had a terrible performance, and that the tiredom of their “people” has a limit.

Again, it stuns so much inconvenience of our government.