Multiplying options

Earlier this month, this column bemoaned the “electoral obsession disorder” plaguing most political and economic debate 14 months ahead of the event and the speculation is indeed absurdly premature but it is what it is – a vicious circle has been created whereby fears of a U-turn next year paralyse all economic initiatives from the private sector with the chances of those fears being realised thus increased. This vicious circle will only be perpetuated while next year’s electoral choice continues to be given the polarised pitch of “Javier Milei or Kirchnerism” (i.e. populist chaos), which remains the government’s pet strategy, and thus needs to be confronted – it is thus not too early to go seeking and fostering alternative alternatives towards a two-party system leading to the institutional consolidation which is key to economic development.

The only route to investor confidence is a range of alternatives whereby transition will not result in transformation but there is more than one way to skin that cat. Former economy minister Hernán Lacunza tossing his hat into the ring as a presidential hopeful is one obvious way of ensuring that all roads lead to the Rome of a market economy but this initiative continues to be widely seen as a bargaining-chip to be withdrawn in exchange for libertarian support for Buenos Aires City Mayor Jorge Macri’s re-election, rather than a serious bid.

Milei does not have to be the only game in town for the centre-right – or in the countryside for that matter. Faced with neglected infrastructure about to swamped by an exceptionally wet spring, farmers might have mixed feelings about a government which has just been exposed as diverting three-quarters of the fuel tax revenues earmarked for road upkeep to propping up its sacrosanct fiscal surplus (artificially sustained by a multi-trillion floating debt), thus clearly showing where their priorities lie. A conservative option with the eye for infrastructure of previous engineer presidents, like Agustín P. Justo or Mauricio Macri, might be seen as a healthy balance.

Two strong centre-right options (the case in 2023, which did not prevent Milei from being the president today) would be less suicidal if not crashing against a solid centre-left front – for that reason Frente de Izquierda deputy Myriam Bregman (whose approval ratings reach 44 percent in some opinion polls, treading on the toes of the Peronist frontrunner, Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof) could paradoxically be seen as the new best friend of market economy enthusiasts. A surge of extreme leftist support eroding any Kirchnerite monopoly on discontent might well be in the best interests of Milei’s re-election – 2023 Peronist presidential candidate Sergio Massa (he of the Barbados wedding anniversary trip) was playing exactly that game when he promoted Milei to head off a mainstream Juntos por el Cambio opposition victory which seemed a done deal against a deeply unpopular Frente de Todos Kirchnerite government, coming within a couple of percentage points of success. Billionaire Peter Thiel might have been even smarter than he is known to be when he spent three hours talking to far leftist Juan Grabois in his Palermo Chico mansion last June – perhaps it was not just a shared passion for J.R.R. Tolkien which brought them together.

Timing is everything, of course. The evangelist outsider Dante Gebel is looking like somebody who made his sprint far too early while it is almost never too late – back in 1995 José Octavio Bordón (although not exactly an outsider as a previous governor of Mendoza) came from nowhere to five million votes (or almost 30 percent) against Carlos Menem in less than two months. Milei threw his hat into the presidential ring as early as mid-2022 in times when then-City mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta was still considered to be inevitably Argentina’s next president – the aforementioned covert aid from Massa was preceded by the confusion in Juntos por el Cambio ranks in contrast to Milei’s clearcut proposals when Patricia Bullrich began to challenge Rodríguez Larreta with the backing of a Mauricio Macri who seemed to imply that Milei might be better still, giving the latter the traction to score his remarkable PASO primary win three Augusts ago.

Polarisation is far from inevitable when at least half of the 60-plus percent discontented with the current course of events are equally averse to a return to Kirchnerism. Whether due to leftist erosion, the emergence of a new outsider or a lack of inland projection, this columnist has the sneaking feeling that Kicillof will end up sharing the fate of the last mainstream opposition presidential candidate Patricia Bullrich by finishing third next year. Yet this middle ground, perhaps falling not far short of half the electorate, is not up for grabs from any outsider because these disgruntled citizens also have the option of simply not voting at all – last year’s midterms saw electoral turnout below 70 percent for the first time in over four decades of democracy. The Dante Gebels thus face the uphill challenge of convincing the disenchanted, perhaps just as hard as convincing investors.

Above all, there remains an urgent need to arrive at a point where alternation in power is not seen as a threat to institutional continuity but rather its guarantee by ensuring that they have a future beyond any single leader in Argentina’s ultra-presidential democracy. Elsewhere in Latin America elements of continuity have been respected between different ideologies (as in Brazil) and even between military rule and democratic government (as in Chile) but it will remain an abstract ideal in Argentina until new names and faces emerge to provide the alternatives to the current dead-end polarisation.