Tag Archives: peronismo

Argentina

Macri, Argentine opposition flex muscle as November runoff looms

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Opposition presidential candidate Mauricio Macri and María Eugenia Vidal, now governor-elect of Buenos Aires province, celebrate on the night of the August primaries.
Opposition presidential candidate Mauricio Macri and María Eugenia Vidal, now governor-elect of Buenos Aires province, celebrate on the night of the August primaries.

When Daniel Scioli emerged on Sunday night to declare victory in the first round of Argentina’s presidential election, it was clear that he did not expect to win the presidency outright and that he would face a runoff — even though no official election results were yet announced.argentina

When the first results finally came at around 11 p.m., they showed a far closer race than anyone predicted. At one point, Scioli’s rival, outgoing Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri, was actually leading Scioli. Ultimately, Scioli narrowly won the presidential election’s first round, but Macri’s support was so unexpectedly strong that he now enters the presidential runoff campaign as the odds-on favorite to end 12 consecutive years of kirchnersimo.

At stake in the presidential showdown is the legacy of one of the most important bastions of Latin America’s populist, statist left.

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Macri, the candidate of the center-right Cambiemos (Spanish for ‘Let’s change’) coalition, has gradually expanded a political movement that was once limited to just the most affluent corners of Argentina’s capital. The son of an Italian immigrant, Macri joined his father’s business in the automobile sector before becoming the president of the popular Boca Juniors football club. He first entered politics in 2003, waging a failed run to become mayor of Buenos Aires. He lost that race, but he used the experience to form a new urban, liberal political party, Propuesta Republicana (PRO, Republican Proposal) in 2005 and, two years later, he won the mayoral election.

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RELATED: Kirchner 2019 comeback could
complicate Scioli presidential bid

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As the standard-bearer of the Cambiemos coalition, he merged his own Buenos Aires-based movement with the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR, Radical Civil Union), a long-lived liberal party that has stood as a contrast for decades to the dominant left-wing populist peronismo. Most voters believe that Macri is the candidate most likely to lift capital controls and bring Argentina back into global debt markets, even if it means a peso devaluation and strong measures to tamp down inflation. Nevertheless, with economic neoliberalism still widely discredited after the economic crisis of 1999-2001, Macri has taken efforts to reassure that he will not subject the Argentine economy to immediate radical change, and he’s even gone out of his way to praise the values of peronismo.

Despite doubts, the Macri campaign’s plan seems to be working. He swept the city of Buenos Aires, along with the provinces of Mendoza, Córdoba, Santa Fe and Entre Rios in Sunday’s vote.

Scioli leads departments shown in blue; Macri in orange; and Massa in violet. (Clarin)
Scioli leads departments shown in blue; Macri in orange; and Massa in violet. (Clarin)

His success in Sunday’s general election took Argentines somewhat by surprise. When election day began, it was conceivable that Scioli, a former vice president and currently the governor of Buenos Aires province, might have scored a first-round victory in the presidential race. He boasted the support of outgoing president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the governing Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory), an electoral coalition anchored by Argentina’s peronista ‘Justicialist’ Party. A former motorboat racing star, Scioli took a lead in polls early in 2015, and he’s consistently held an advantage to become Argentina’s next president. Despite rampant inflation, health scares, political intrigue and a slowing economy, Kirchner’s approval ratings have generally improved over the course of the last year — so much so that everyone expects her to try to return to the Casa Rosada in the 2019 election. Most recently, in Argentina’s compulsory open presidential primaries on August 9, Scioli won 38.4% of the vote versus just 30.1% for Cambiemos.

What a difference two months can make. Continue reading Macri, Argentine opposition flex muscle as November runoff looms →

Argentina

Everything you need to know about Argentina’s impending default

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CFK

It ultimately took an American hedge fund to unite the Argentine people behind the increasingly unpopular presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.argentina

Now, after a prolonged fight that has its roots in Argentina’s last debt default over a decade ago, a fight that has weaved its way through the corridors of power in Buenos Aires, via the banks of New York and London, into the highest court of the United States, and with consequences that will reverberate from Brasília to Caracas, Argentina is now defaulting, once again, on its debt obligations.

How did Argentina end up in this situation? And what will happen if Argentina, which technically entered default at midnight earlier today, doesn’t arrive at a deal with its creditors?

Here’s a primer on everything you need to know about the Argentine default — and why it’s such an odd, twisting and ultimately fascinating story about Latin American politics, global finance, US constitutional law and the ‘north-south’ dynamic of international relations. Continue reading Everything you need to know about Argentina’s impending default →

Argentina, Venezuela

Will Venezuela or Argentina be the first to crumble into economic crisis?

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kirchnermaduro

I write tomorrow for The National Interest about the dual economic crises in Venezuela and Argentina.argentinaVenezuela Flag Icon

The similarities between the two economic crises are uncanny — inflation, capital controls, dollar shortages, overvalued currencies, shortages, etc.

But the similarities don’t stop there.  Both countries currently fee political limitations to force policy changes to avert crisis — and that limit the political capital of the leaders of both countries, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, to enact reforms:

Accordingly, normal political channels seem blocked through at least the end of 2015, despite the fact that both countries should be considering massive economic policy u-turns that will require significant amounts of political goodwill neither Maduro nor Fernández de Kirchner possess. But there’s an even greater inertia lurking beyond even the routine political impasse—a kind of political dead-hand control in both countries, on both a short-term and long-term basis.

First, both Venezuela and Argentina remain tethered to the political ideologies of chavismoand kirchnerismo, even though their proponents, Chávez and Néstor Kirchner, are now dead. Those policies may have worked over the last decade to achieve certain goals, including greater social welfare and poverty reduction in Venezuela and a rapid return to economic growth and competitive exports for Argentina. But it should be clear by now that chavismoand kirchnerismo are unable to provide answers to their respective countries’ economic woes today.

Even more broadly, I argue that beyond the shortcomings of chavismo and kirchnerismo, Venezuela faces a long-term resources curse and Argentina faces the long-term legacy of protectionism and statism of peronismo, which in each case underlie the current economic crises.  What’s more, the IMF-sponsored reforms in 1989 that led to the massive Caracazo riots in Venezuela and the IMF-approved lending tied to Argentina’s 1990s ‘convertibility’ crisis that led to the 1999-2001 peso crisis have undermined orthodox economic policymaking:

What’s more, ill-conceived attempts to rupture those dominant paradigms through orthodox ‘Washington consensus’ reform processes led to economic and political disaster. In both countries, leaders experimented with neoliberalism, facilitated by the misguided zeal of the International Monetary Fund, without enacting any corresponding safety nets or shock absorbers. The resulting crises led both countries to double down on their prevailing ideologies, thereby, ironically, making economic reform today even more difficult.

In both cases, the political, historical and economic legacies have prevented the broadly moderate, business-friendly, social democratic middle courses that much of the rest of South America has embraced to wide success, including Colombia, Peru, Chile, Brazil.

Venezuela

World leaders descend upon Chávez funeral: one photo, but mil palabras

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whoswho

What’s always been so interesting about chavismo is the way that the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez managed to build alliances both with just about every leader in Latin America, no matter how radical or moderate, while also building close alliances with a ‘who’s who’ of world rogue leaders on poor terms with the United States of America.Venezuela Flag Icon

It makes for an interesting set of photos from Chávez’s funeral — the photo above comes from the Facebook feed of Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of México, a country that’s had relatively little use for Venezuela over the past 14 years — former president Felipe Calderón used Chávez as a boogeyman in the 2006 Mexican presidential election to warn voters against the one-time leftist frontrunner, former Mexican City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and that may have made the difference in that election.

Chávez died Tuesday in Caracas after a long fight with cancer, suddenly bringing to life Venezuelan politics that had largely been frozen in waiting on Chávez’s health since his 11-point reelection in October 2012.

Peña Nieto was expected to move Mexican relations closer to Venezuela than under the more right-wing Calderón, but Peña Nieto and Chávez were hardly best friends.  That relationship was part and parcel of the diverse set of relationships that Chávez had with the rest of Latin America — sometimes ally, sometimes foil, sometimes donor and often, all three simultaneously.  Those relationships, all of which are on display this week in Caracas, give us a rough sense of whether chavismo — and the broader form of the populist, socialist left that has been on the rise in Latin America (though not necessarily in its largest, most economically successful, countries like México and Brazil) — will live beyond Chávez.

Peña Nieto is in the fourth row, standing between businessman Ricardo Martinelli, Panama’s conservative president to his left and Peruvian president Ollanta Humala to his right.  Humala, who won a very close election in 2011 in Perú, was feared as a potential chavista radical leftist, anathema to Peru’s business elite, despite renouncing a chavista-style government in Perú.  In fact, Humala has turned out to govern as a business-friendly moderate, garnering relatively more criticism from environmentalists and social activists on the left since his election.

There in the front row, you can see Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Cuba’s president Raúl Castro (who has the distinction of belonging to both the ‘rogue state’ and ‘Latin American’ groups), the new ‘acting’ first lady of Venezuela Cilia Flores, and her husband, acting president Nicolás Maduro. Continue reading World leaders descend upon Chávez funeral: one photo, but mil palabras →