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Voting results after the first round of the election, October 23 GeorgistEnjoyer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons |
Apologies for the long hiatus. The links to the Iain McGilchrist article and animation (comments on this post) were fascinating. I thought about them and had conversations about them for weeks. Then I became busy, plus there was the “tango teaching saga” of which more sometime. Most recently I was at the Barcelona Queer Tango festival last weekend and have been ill since Thursday.
I have dragged myself from the sickbed to advance with some kind of productivity, even if only a blog post; not least because Argentina votes for their leader tomorrow (now today, Sunday). I have spoken, in recent weeks, with people of different viewpoints. Two are Argentinian, all of them from Abya Yala / Latin America. Conveying what I heard on this topic seemed the most pertinent choice of post. And there are, improbably, some links to tango.
There are two contenders in the presidential election. Currently, Milei leads against Massa by a fraction.
If you’re catching up on all this, Milei is the ranting, chainsaw-wielding right wing libertarian who wants to dollarise the economy, re-criminalise abortion, loosen gun laws and allow people to sell organs. Climate change, for him, is a “socialist lie”. He contested, by a huge margin, the number of victims of Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship, the wounds from which are far from healed.
Milei would also close down the ministries for culture, for environment, for women and gender diversity, for public works, for science, for labour and social security and for education. “Out, out, out” he says, ripping the names of them all off a board in his campaign video. That’s where the chainsaw comes in - a very physical metaphor for slashing the state. Curiously, he has that nostalgia of so many Argentinians for the past: we were once as rich as the US.
It is not that clear who Milei is: sex coach perhaps (Guardian, August 14)? An Argentinian friend on the left described him, contemptuously, as the TV pundit you would see on daytime chat shows; someone trivial, brash, inconsequential.
And then, suddenly, not so inconsequential, due to a campaign run largely on TikTok. It recalls Rodolfo Hernández. "el viejito del TikTok", the right wing Colombian populist, running, like Milei, on an anti-corruption, shrink-the-government ticket. He was defeated by Gustavo Petro in Colombia’s elections last year in a similarly neck-and-neck run-off giving that country its first ever left-leaning leader. The Milei-Hernández similarities are striking, but while Hernández seemed, well, a bit of an idiot, albeit one who garnered an astonishing proportion of the vote, Milei seems, if anything, more alarming. Is it the education systems, the global "bird brain" phenomenon that seems to have risen with social media or is it because people are simply so desperate that they are easily manipulated by such shallow populists?
Others might describe Milei as a politician, author and economist (World Economic Forum). He sounds insanely dangerous: violent, inexperienced, a showman. Argentina is not on the fragile (previously “failed”) states index, but its inflation is running at nearly 140%. 40% of the country lives in poverty, while this article claims a majority depend on the state. It is actually surprisingly difficult to find a figure for this but it looks like about half the population are on some form of state support. Milei would strip away that state but says “Argentines depending on state aid to survive are the victims of the system, not the victimisers, therefore, we won’t make any decisions transferring the austerity cost that needs to happen to them”. The idea is to stop people living off and within an inefficient government, introduce a voucher system for education and promote choice and therefore competition, thereby driving up standards. A similar idea applies to healthcare.
That’s the new guy. The incumbent - and they usually have the advantage - is the centrist, Massa, minister for the economy. It’s an unenviable job. When he took over, in August 2022, inflation was running at 78.5%. It’s risen 80% under his leadership. This is what Argentina’s inflation looks like over 25 years. It was already out of control but it's now rocketing skyward. Massa, however promises a unity government. He is known as much for his consensus-seeking as Milei is for causing division. As a Peronist, Massa has given tax breaks to the working classes but my - very left wing - Argentine friend says he’s no friend of the left.
A man from a different country on the same continent follows Argentine politics, knows Argentina, seems to love it, in many ways but thought Milei has, in essence, the right idea.
A: Milei wants to break the state because 60% of the population get government handouts compared to 5% who pay income tax, while the unions are paid by the government. Peronism is broken.
B: I'm confused about what that movement represents.
A: No wonder, it has gone from the left to the right. It has no ideology.
B: What about his ideas about relaxing gun laws, criminalising abortion, shutting down the ministry for women….?
A: It’s true, some of his ideas on the cultural side leave something to be desired, but a lot of that country has those sorts of views towards women. It’s hardly just him.
B: What about Massa, minister for the economy?
A: Why would you elect a Peronist economy minister responsible for inflation running at currently nearly 140%?
B: So do you think Milei will win?
A: No. Too many depend on state handouts and he would get rid of all that.
B: I knew, slightly, a guy from La Boca born into a family from northern Europe with a strong work ethic. Initially, he loved tango, the lyrics, the culture, not the dance, he joined the tango academy. He was a Communist in his youth, went round the factories. Now he has a professional private practice, lives in a good area…
A [wryly]: Everyone’s a communist until they start making money…
B: Well, then he rejected tango, finding in it the epitome of, so he said, Argentina’s malaise: a nostalgia for the past, an avoidance of the problems of today. He didn’t like his country, didn’t like using “vos”, cultivated a British accent. It was as though he wanted to escape. I later found out there was a phrase for this, applied to people who feel this way “salir por Ezeiza [Buenos Aires' airport]”, to run away, take the easy way out. But he couldn't or wouldn't leave. I guess that accounted for the "tristeza", that I saw in him and have seen in other Argentinians.
A: Argentina has a fantastic culture, but that apart, why would any educated Argentinian not want to escape Argentina?
I asked about his own country’s well known privatisation of institutions that are publicly run in many countries. He agreed this was true, but said things work now. In Latin America, he said, when you put everything in the hands of government, nothing works. I remember my dad saying the same about when most of Britain was nationalised. “The trains,” he said. “British Rail was a catastrophe”. I remember British Rail. The trains were old, slam-door, plenty still had compartments. They were a bit smelly, but solid. I liked them. Now, they are more modern but prohibitively expensive. Most people I know take the bus and don't travel too far.
A: The people who want to work for the state just want security because it’s impossible to get rid of them.
B: It sounds like European state machinery. They don’t do things and they certainly don’t improve, just an endless, enormous bureaucracy designed to provide jobs for life and where everyone’s always on holiday, out for lunch, or unhelpful. It’s not great here, but it’s not like that.
A: Yes. It’s different here. A job in the government doesn’t mean a job for life the same way it does in other countries.
I mentioned poverty had gone down in his country.
B: Why wouldn’t it?
A: Because when you privatise you end up with greater inequality
B: No, you end up with things that are more efficient.
Still, deepened inequality is the risk I see, under Milei, as in all countries in which capitalism has become a runaway train.
I put these points to the Argentinian on the left. He said that the high levels of poverty were largely due to the conditional loan of 45 billion USD that the Macri (a previous president) administration requested from the IMF "usurero" / usurious during his government and which was not used as expected.
Footnote: he called Macri “el gato Macri”. I looked this up. Originally, “gato” referred to an actress or singer taken out for drinks and “looked after”. Gatillar, “bien lunfardo” refers to paying, from which “gato”, literally, and somewhat confusingly, “cat”. Its meaning then changed to signify the one “paid for” and came to be associated with prostitution. So as I understand the inference, it’s that Macri is prostituting himself to the IMF. A quick look at the lyrics from the famous Donato tango, Gato suggests the same idea: someone who of little substance themselves but who blends in, takes advantage of good situations, and vanishes in hard times, someone “arrastrado por los vientos como un trozo de papel,” - “tossed on the wind like a scrap of paper”.
The lyrics of the Canaro tango Cogote have a similar sense:
Traés, llevás, hacés de secretario
Y preparás el plato a tu patrón,
[You fetch and carry, run about like a secretary
And prepare your boss’s dinner.]
I will have to delve into the nuances between “cogote” and “gato” but both sound like proponents of servile behaviour, to further their own ends, certainly there is a power imbalance. Both, it is clear, are disparaging terms.
My friend went on to say that most rights in Argentina are due to Peronism. Rights which Milei, a sinister character, he said, would eliminate at a stroke. Milei, he continued, was in the service of “los poderes concentrados” and is now under the protection of another lackey and traitor, like Macri, who always, he said, lived off the state he criticised so much.
I am not sure whose protection Milei is supposed to be under nor who the concentrated powers are meant to be. America, I expect, which, I have learned to generally, carefully call “the US” . It’s something I’ve learned over the last two years. To assume, even as a native English speaker, that America means “North America” is non-inclusive and disrespectful to many living in South and Central America. There is an argument that even those names, or the catch-all “Latin America” dismisses the indigenous roots of the continent. I remember the friend once suggesting I could say "Americans" instead of "Latinos" and it felt like the total inversion it was meant to be.
He laughed, sarcastically at the implication that Argentinians are macho (presumably at: “It’s true, some of his ideas on the cultural side leave something to be desired, but a lot of that country has those sorts of views towards women.”). If you’re interested in this, I wrote about the same man’s thought-through ideas on Argentinian machismo a few years ago.
The Argentinian responded by saying that people from the other man’s country are “re machistas” / very macho. “Contále al muchacho...”, he said, with his Buenos Aires accent stressing the second syllable of the verb, “Tell the guy that the movement in favour of safe, legal, free abortion began in this country [Argentina].”
He went on “It’s true that the issue is very complicated. Nevertheless, thanks to free, secular education [in Argentina] there is social mobility: someone born in the worst poverty can move out of it. What happens in [that guy's country]? University education is privatised and people can’t study. “So they [foreign students] come to Argentina”. This is true. Many university students do come to Argentina from abroad for the free education and leave afterwards. Why they don’t have to pay is a mystery.
“O se endeudan de por vida”, he added. [Or they get into lifelong debt]. “It’s the same in Brazil.“
Except people do study and pay for further education in England and in the US [Scottish residents don't pay tuition fees]. They take out student loans and pay them back when they have the kind of job that a university education is meant to lead to. There were huge protests when tuition fees were introduced in England. But people don’t necessarily think of it as being indebted for life, but rather as a way of paying retrospectively, for the better job you are meant to get - and often do get - from going to university. I didn't put this to him.
He ended scathingly, presumably in reference to the rhetorical question “Why would any educated Argentinian not want to escape Argentina?”
“For he / she [he is scrupulous about lenguaje inclusivo] who doesn’t love this country and who thinks that the only way out [presumably of the problems] is via Ezeiza, I wish them goodbye and good luck. But later, when they experience discrimination and things don’t go as they expect...vuelven con la frente marchita y la cola entre las piernas. [they will be back with furrowed brow and tail between their legs”
The man loves his country probably more than anyone I’ve ever met loves theirs.
I asked an Argentinian woman who had been living in Barcelona since April what she thought about the Milei / Massa situation. She was clearly in the Milei camp. She believed the voucher system for education would work. We don’t need middlemen, she said. I can’t quite see how middlemen fit in the current education system in Argentina. It looks as though Milei wants to privatise education, along with everything else, and the voucher system will, ostensibly, allow those without means to choose a private school. So actually, the vouchers are a kind of middleman in that scenario.
The woman, a dance professional, thought there were enough dollars in the economy to dollarise it and that Milei was making deals for investment in the meantime. Actually, markets panicked at the success of Milei in the primaries, leading the central bank to devalue the currency by 18% and to hike interest rates to 118%. The markets had been betting on moderates. The émigrée was fed up with state inefficiency and profligacy. She thought Milei’s plan to slash the state would bring about necessary reform and cut out corruption at the same time.
She talked about the economic faultline down the middle of the country: two currencies operating, only one of them officially. People are paid in pesos but goods, especially houses, cars anything of luxury are in dollars. They don't match up. "Average Argentinian salaries are 300-400 USD." She paused for emphasis, before adding, "...per month. That fracture is what Milei proposes to fix by dollarising." Patricia Bullrich was another contender on the right. If Bullrich's supporters put their weight behind Milei, that could tip the balance, she said. It looks as though that is what's happening.
Voting is mandatory for ages 18-70. Election results are expected after 9PM local time (midnight, in the UK).
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