The government led by Alberto Fernández of Frente de Todos, who took office on December 10, 2019, emerged as part of a political strategy to defeat the then-officialism of Juntos por el Cambio, headed by Mauricio Macri. This strategy, devised by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, constituted the new government, not as a coalition of government, but as a coalition of power.
A government coalition is understood as the agreement between two or more political forces around a relatively consensual political program that keeps aspects considered fundamental by the forces that make up the coalition.
On the other hand, a coalition of power is the agreement of two or more political forces or spaces with the sole objective of winning an election.
The 2019 presidential election in Argentina had these characteristics: an agreement between Kirchnerism and sectors of non-Kirchnerist territorial Peronism, who allied themselves on the understanding that the largest coalition space, the movement led by Cristina Fernández, could not win the election by alone. So much so that the natural leader of the space was relegated to the position of vice president in the electoral formula. Although the triumph was clear, there were also four years of government that were not so consensual.
The Covid-19 pandemic, which emerged as soon as he took office, generated another political scenario, and his management allowed the centrality of the presidential figure of Alberto Fernández.
The Frente de Todos continued to be a common front, but as the months passed, the governments were forced to manage not only the health crisis, but also the economic crisis due to the closure and the drop in activity, for differences to emerge within the coalition.
The disagreements continued: the return to face-to-face education, the continuity of health policy, fiscal needs, the relationship with the districts governed by the opposition and progressive inflation, as well as the recovery of backward consumption. In short, issues that shook the government agenda and began to shake the electoral agreement.
However, the theme that led to the current fracture, which was not very explicit, was the need to face what had been postponed in times of a pandemic: the negotiation with the IMF for the refinancing of the debt maturity, a debt, in large part, contracted in Macri’s government, which neither the Argentine government nor the Argentine economy were prepared to face.
The agreement with the IMF required, as has always been the case, an important fiscal adjustment that, in an inflationary context such as the one that is going through the country and recessive as a result of the pandemic, it was difficult to sustain from an electoral perspective, taking into account the presidential elections in the country. next year.
The warning was the electoral defeat of the officialdom in the November 2021 midterm elections, which allowed the opposition to equalize forces in Congress.
The fissure that opened up before the signing of the agreement with the IMF had divided the main partners of the former power coalition: Kirchnerism, on the one hand, and “Albertism”, plus most of the Peronist governors, the CGT – the main confederation union – and the main social organizations, on the other.
On the other hand, the opposition of Juntos por Cambio, which was a coalition government between 2015 and 2019, and which is sustained as a programmatic agreement in addition to its different political origins, began to celebrate in silence.
But the division within the government became official with the parliamentary treatment of the law that the president derived to approve the agreement with the IMF. Parliamentary approval, which was not requested by the Fund, was probably sent by the president to definitively measure forces. The agreement was approved in Congress with the votes of “Albertism” and the opposition, and the rejection of Kirchnerism, the other partner of the Frente de Todos.
What followed the parliamentary approval was a media war between the ex-partners, each day more bitter, for the delight and electoral calculation of the opposition.
Current politics, especially in Latin America, is basically made up of agreements between different political and social forces whose main, legitimate objective is to win elections. However, reality is showing (Lenín Moreno, Jair Bolsonaro, Alberto Fernández, Pedro Castillo and perhaps also López Obrador), that after an electoral triumph it is necessary to govern, and without solid programmatic bases and agreements, these electoral triumphs turn into pyrrhic victories. .
The problem is that those who suffer from these disagreements and from the impact of internal struggles within governments are not their protagonists, but societies.
