Milei facing the dangerous edge of a why

How will he teach? Roberto Fontanarrosajust like between two World Cups, from one presidential election to the next what happens is usually the lives of the voters.

This transition between one decision and the next offers enormous opportunities for change in a country fed up with the failure of its rulers.. Javier Milei took advantage of this sequence caused by the ruinous management of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Kirchner.

These four years leading up to the next appointment of a president have been very different from those days of pandemic, insufferable fights between the president and his vice and exhaustion of all Kirchnerist recipes. Even the experiment of putting a pseudo president in the Ministry of Economy failed in a desperate attempt to avoid sinking all together.

Milei is heading to seek re-election convinced that he will obtain recognition similar to the one he received last year in the parliamentary elections. He analyzes the macroeconomic indicators and is convinced that he will have no rivals: those numbers confirm his promise to apply the chainsaw to public spending and reduce inflation (in process). And they also reveal the magnitude of the social effort and the strong reformatting that makes part of the productive structure creak.

Milei won with the promise of a pure and simple adjustment to accommodate public accounts and to direct the country towards an open capitalist regime integrated with the world, free of protectionism and subsidies.

Although he will ask for another four years to complete that unfinished task, he can tell himself that he has done enough to be re-elected. The issue for him is that the majority of Argentines agree; nothing is that simple.

Wrapped in a visible fanaticism for himself and his achievements, Milei can stumble if the economy of large numbers does not begin to connect with the personal economy, that of the square meter of each voter.

The President’s dilemma is to show that the enormous effort made has meaning for those who made it. And that motivation cannot be exhausted by contemplating the large numbers, in general terms aimed at the normalization of a chronic inflationary disorder caused by exorbitant public spending.

The link between the general and the particular is what fuels the electoral decision that will occur in a year and a half. It’s not just about the data that averages reality. A necessary but painful transition occurs in the real economy, tinged with different colors, illusions and anguish.

One thing is the dizzying takeoff of the Andean provinces, subjected, as in the case of Neuquén, to intense and challenging growth. Another is the alternative they took the mining provinceswhere the investments of large enterprises will still take a few years to be realized. Beyond that, the agricultural center of the country is looking forward to the possibility that the withholdings will ever be completely removed.

The fate of the small and medium-sized industry is different. And even more distressing is the visible drop in consumption that paralyzes commercial activity, causes countless closures and, in the best of cases, forces strong cost reengineering to face survival.

The picture in general terms is completed with an element of strong electoral correlation: each person’s pocketbook. Statistics indicate that a portion of registered employees have managed to maintain their salary level in relation to inflation.

Another part, public employees in all areas, have suffered a drop in their income as a result of the spending cuts carried out by the Nation and which provinces and municipalities were reluctantly forced to make as well.

There is a different way of looking at the pocket. The composition of household spending changed dramatically in some cases once services increased above inflation as much of the state subsidies were stripped away. Adapting to that reality was not easy, much less when the fear of losing a job in industry or commerce was added to the hardship.

The transformation or simply the disappearance of sectors that were exposed in their lack of competitiveness is a phase of this process that, despite being expected and explainable, will never be celebrated by its victims. The latest labor indicators reflect an increase in unemployment in manufacturing areas and a growth in precarious jobs.

These situations may have an electoral reflection in theThe most populated areas of the country; Thinking otherwise can be a very costly mistake for libertarians.

The point to be discovered amidst the self-celebratory speeches and promises to accelerate through the curves is whether the economy determined by Milei will give any sign of hope.

In a sentence: It is reasonable to expect that widespread effort will have a reward for those who made it. And in a shorter period than they usually undergo transformations as profound as those that the country decided to face when it elected Milei the first time.

Less decisive than each person’s pocketbook and the understanding of maintaining the effort is the resignation of La Libertad Avanza to be the moral counterpart of Kirchnerism.

In the second round of 2023, Milei achieved more than twenty percentage points from Together for Change, the force that until then led the opposition to Cristina Kirchner.

The condemnation of corruption was never a central value in Argentina, but it was always complementary and even decisive to explain failures such as that of Kirchnerism in the management of the economy.

Both the protection of Manuel Adorni and the suspicions centered on scandals that directly refer to Milei and his sister leave evidence that the libertarians are in that sense a postmodern version of Menemism, that predecessor of theft that for the longest time and most zeal represented the Kirchnerist version of Peronism.

Adorni’s tax evasion is accompanied by a dangerous evasion of Milei’s political reality. Those accounts are usually very expensive.