I fear I'm about to lose my country

Reminds me of that woman who told Adlai Stevenson that all thinking persons were voting for him.
He answered “That’s not enough, madam; we need a majority!”

True enough. But one must remain hopeful. For example, if you do think you have lost your country, one might look east of Chile, around Uruguay, or in the next World Cup Championship. (Some things don’t change much.)

:laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

I knew it was around there, somewhere.

Wait… In order to be taken seriously, they had to make up bullshit accusations out of thin air?

You see what we are dealing with, as I said they are not only evil, it’s worse: they are profoundly idiotic too!

As terrifying as evil & incompetent might be, evil & competent is even worse.

I don’t think so, competent evil has goals and goes after them in a rational fashion, incompetent evil is unpredictable.

The best swordsman in the world doesn’t fear the second beat swordsman in the world,he fears the worst, because he can’t predict what he will do.

Also, Juan Domingo Peron famously said
“I’ve known evil people that became good, but never an idiot who became intelligent”

Ok, this just happened:

Milei went to the Teatro Colón (Sorta equivalent to the Met Opera) to see Madame Butterfly…
And was promptly booed by the audience and apparently had to leave.
To cap it all the Orchestra played the Peronist March while all this happened, the very same Peronist March that was forbidden for years under the dictatorships he defends.
God, I love my country.
I’m less afraid now, to be honest, even if they win they are not going to destroy a people capable of things like these.
Even if darkness falls Aurë entuluva!

Now, that’s the spirit. Y’all have come through some real shit before.

Well, it looks it wasn’t quite so epic.
Some of the public supported Milei (but more people was against him).
And it wasn’t the whole orchestra but only a trompetist and may be others.
Anyway it’s of great significance, because the Teatro Colón and the usually wealthy audience that goes there represent some of the more anti-peronist parts of the country.
Things like these make me hope that an democracy-antidemocracy axis has replaced the ages old peronist-antiperonist axis of argentinian politics.
The election is tomorrow, usually we know the results the night of election day, but in this case?.. who knows.

Do you think the election will be reasonably free and fair?

Absolutely, in the 40 years since the return of democracy we haven’t had even one sustained report of fraud.

The party in power lost the election a lot of times: 1989, 1999, 2015 and 2019 (and that’s only presidential elections).

The system is in itself very robust, full of checks and counter-checks.

This article may be of interest to you.

Excerpt:

Argentina will vote on November 19th in a run-off election to decide whether Sergio Massa, the Peronist economy minister, or Javier Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist”, will become its next president. This polarising election comes against a troubled background. Inflation is heading for 200% this year and 40% of Argentines live in poverty. And yet, thanks largely to the fertility of the vast pampas, Argentina was in 1914 one of the ten richest countries in the world measured by income per person (although this was very unequally distributed). The past 70 years or so have been decades of decline and political conflict, interrupted by shorter periods of growth and stability. For most of that time the country has been ruled by Peronism, the amorphous populist movement founded by Juan and Eva Perón that is woven deeply into the social fabric. Yet Argentina, whose population is mainly descended from immigrants from Europe, especially Italy and Spain, is also a country of immense creative prowess. Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote poems and short stories involving metaphysical riddles, was one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, though he wrote little about his native country. From the music of the tango to film and football Argentina has made its mark in the world. Its intellectual classes, still scarred by a brutal military dictatorship and urban guerrilla war in the 1970s, are prone to brooding self-analysis—not for nothing does Buenos Aires have more psychoanalysts per person than any other big city in the world. The following books, one of which is for readers of Spanish, offer a window onto this country of paradoxes.

The article then briefly reviews several books:

The Invention of Argentina. By Nicolas Shumway. University of California Press; 352 pages

The Invention of Argentina. By Nicolas Shumway. University of California Press; 352 pages; $33.95 and £29

Argentina 1516-1987: From Spanish Colonisation to Alfonsín. By David Rock. University of California Press; 576 pages;

A State of Fear: Memories of Argentina’s Nightmare. By Andrew Graham-Yooll. Eland Books; 168 pages; $37 and £13.99

Santa Evita. By Tomás Eloy Martínez. Knopf; 384 pages; $17. Transworld Publishers; £16.99

In Patagonia. By Bruce Chatwin. Penguin; 240 pages; $14.99. Vintage; £10.99

Fever Dream. By Samanta Schweblin. Translated by Megan McDowell. Penguin; 192 pages; $17. Oneworld Publications; £8.99

El Nudo: Por qué el conurbano bonaerense modela la política argentina. By Carlos Pagni. Planeta; 776 pages; $52

This people know how to count?
The last 70 years in Argentina:

1953 - 1955 : Peronism - 2 years.
1955 - 1983 : UCR (“Union Civica Radical”) with peronism forbidden to run for election, and assorted military dictatorships - 28 years
1983 - 1989 : UCR - 6 years
1989 - 1999 : Peronism (If you can call it that, given the policies implemented, but fair’s fair they were technically peronists) - 10 years
1999 - 2001 : UCR - 3 years
2001 - 2015 : Peronism - 14 years.
2015 - 2019 : “Juntos por el cambio”, Sorta right wing allied with the UCR. - 4 years
2019 - 2023 : Peronism - 4 years.
Peronism Total : 2 + 10 + 14 + 4 = 30 years
Non-Peronism Total : 28 + 6 + 3 + 4 = 40 years.

So, in their eyes 30 > 40 ?

That song about the “70 years of peronism” is typical of Argentinian anti-peronists.

I made a mistake there, forgot the 1973-1976 Peronist govenment, so it’s more 37 to 33, still not “Most of that time”

It seems wrong, but maybe not the biggest mistake. But I would be interested in your opinion of this article, written by an Economist editor back in 2020, featuring an imagined conversation between Angela Merkel and Alberto Fernández about Peronism. I find it seems different people use the term in different ways.

Excerpt

[In February 2020] Argentina’s new Peronist president, Alberto Fernández, joined Angela Merkel for dinner at the German chancellery in Berlin. According to press reports, Mrs Merkel asked her guest a question: “What is Peronism? I don’t understand. Are you on the left or the right?” [The Economist] imagines a conversation that might have followed.

….“Let me explain,” said Mr Fernández cautiously. “First of all, we’re not populists. That was an invention of Mauricio Macri, my neo-liberal predecessor. We don’t just stir up the masses.”

“Really?” asked Mrs Merkel, sounding unconvinced.

“Really. I’m a social democrat,” the president insisted. “The base of Peronism is the trade unions and the poor, whom we always look after. But we also have the industrialists behind us. They liked General Juan Perón’s protectionism 75 years ago and they like it today. And we have the pope.”

“As always, Perón himself put it best,” Mr Fernández continued. “In 1972 he told a journalist: ‘Look, in Argentina, 30% are Radicals…30% are conservatives and a similar amount Socialists.’ ‘So where are the Peronists?’ asked the journalist. ‘Ah,’ replied Perón, ‘we are all Peronists.’”

“Perhaps we should try this Peronism thing,” mused his host. Slightly alarmed, an aide to the chancellor intervened. “We have done some research,” he said. “And we have read ‘What is Populism?’ by Jan-Werner Müller, a German political scientist. The professor writes that ‘populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people.’” The aide went on: “Perón said that his movement ‘has ceased to be the cause of one man to become the cause of the people’. He also said ‘true democracy is where the government does what the people want and defends a single interest, that of the people.’”

*“Quite,” said Mr Fernández. “That’s why we have no social explosion in Argentina.”

“The first problem,” replied the pesky aide, “is who decides who constitute ‘the people’? Do those who disagree with you belong or not? What is clear to us is that Peronism is a populist way of exercising power, and that’s why you can be both left- and right-wing. Herr Professor also writes that populist governments usually try to hijack the state apparatus, are prone to corruption and practise ‘mass clientelism’. We have seen this in Argentina.”

Faced with such cold Weberian logic, Mr Fernández changed tack. “We are the people who know how to run the state and the economy,” he chipped in. “We are the professionals.” He explained that in 1989 and 2002 Peronists had inherited economic chaos. “And that’s what Macri left me, too,” he complained.

“True,” intervened the aide. “But it was the Peronists who created the mess in the first place. You have dominated Argentina since 1946. In that period the country has moved from the first world to the third.” There was an awkward silence. The chancellor cut in: “President Fernández…or may I call you Alberto?”

“Cristina does,” came the reply.

“Cristina? Oh, your vice-president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who used to be president herself. Yes, I met her. Her government asserted in 2015 that there was more poverty in Germany than in her Argentina, which was nonsense. And she claimed to have abolished inflation by changing the head of the statistics institute. Germans would never stand for that. There’d be a revolution.”

“We are not hiding inflation,” said Mr Fernández. “I’ve frozen most pensions for a few months, so inflation will get rid of the fiscal deficit just as your bankers want me to. We’ve also negotiated a wage freeze with our union allies. As the Argentine saying goes, ‘Some bums will bleed more than others.’”

“Our companies tell me they won’t invest in Argentina until you lift exchange controls and open up the economy,” added the chancellor.

“I am a moderate,” said Mr Fernández. “I know that dollars don’t grow on ombu trees. Argentina should join the world. But you are asking me to dance the tango while I’m still in intensive care.”

As she finished her rabbit, Mrs Merkel said consolingly: “I can see that it’s not easy to be a Peronist social democrat.” “It isn’t,” said Mr Fernández. “The economy is a mess, everyone expects a Peronist president to shower them with money, and I don’t have any. I don’t normally drink, but I need a glass of Malbec.”

They invented a conversation?
Anyway it looks like they assigned to Alberto Fernandez some typical peronist sayings (surely they had some Argentinian help there) and exaggerated some bonehead things previous peronist leaders say or did.
For example ‘the government’ didn’t say that there was more poverty in Germany than in Argentina, some functionary did say something like that when trying to explain the different ways different countries measure poverty.
Cristina Kirchner never claimed to have eliminated inflation by not measuring it (but the way the government measured inflation was changed to try and hide it, that is true)
Some bums will bleed more than others. is not something I remotely identify as an Argentinian saying, may be it’s the translation.

The “populism” accusations are not entirely wrong, Peronism is a popular movement, sometimes closer to that “populism” description, sometimes less so.
As I said before, comparing original peronism to Huey Long’s political organization is wrong, but closer to the mark that Peronists would like to admit.

On the other hand, It’s hard to find too many Right-wingers in Peronism, they are there but are vastly outnumbered by the left.
The way foreign media sees peronism is usually shaped by argentinian anti-peronists.

Now, again, I don’t blame anti-peronists for being anti-peronists, as in peronism there are anti-peronist from every political current, from fascists to leftists that think that peronism only attacks the symptoms of the problems and not the root cause.

Hell, I didn’t much like Peronism for most of my life, but as time goes by I find that the alternatives go from mildly inoffensive to downright disgusting.

But at this point, with a trump-lover and bolsonaro-admiring fascist as the alternative, even anti-peronists are going to pinch their noses and vote for a moderate peronist (Massa never liked the Kirchners and the feeling was mutual).

I hope enough of them do to save the country form 4 years of hell.

Thanks for your explanations. It is not unusual for different people to use political terms in different ways. The differences between the Republicanism of Nixon, Reagan and Trump are pretty large. Everyone agrees Perón was the archetype, of course, but to a foreigner the term as applied today might seem to sometimes depend a little on who is using it. But maybe Argentinians broadly agree on what it is.

If so, I agree an “imagined conversation” is a lazy conceit. (One of the Canadian newspapers is fond of writing articles about “the imagined thoughts of X” which often seems like shoddy journalism to me).

Particularly since the article gives the impression Peronism is a sort of alliance between unions and industry with some focus on societal issues. This would not seem that out of place in Germany? In particular, Germany is said to have an unusual degree of union involvement on corporate boards and industrialists there are said to try hard to reach a collaborative consensus with workers and unions (no doubt there are temporal, political, economic and regional variations of this stereotypical application). So this does not seem so alien a concept, though in Argentina it maybe involves more focus on social issues and (as Canadian politicians are forever saying) on fairness and improved opportunities for “those who aspire to join the middle class”.