The recent presidential election in Argentina saw the victory of outgoing president Carlo Menem. What factors may be adduced to explain his victory so widely forecast by the opinion polls?
First a few facts and figures: Carlos Mеnem, Partido Justicialista (Peronist) received 49.46 per cent of the votes: his two main rivals, José Octavio Bordón, Frepaso (Frente del País Solidario) and Horacio Massaccesi, Unión Cívica Radical, received 29.63 per cent and 17 per cent, respectively.
This meant that Menem was elected at the first round, since a new electoral law has established that there is no need for a second round if the leading candidate gets over 40 per cent in the first round and his nearest rival is at least 10 per cent behind.
The changes in the electoral law were introduced by the so-called Olivos pact, agreed last year between government and opposition. The main feature of the pact was the introduction of a clause allowing presidents to run for a second term of office, previously not allowed by the constitution. Obviously even a year ago Menem was fairly confident about being re-elected.
On the same day the Argentinian electorate was called upon to vote in a partial political election for the House of Deputies and the Senate: 130 seats were decided for the former (around half of the total seats) and 40 for the latter (around 55 per cent); provincial governors and most city councils were also elected.
The partial legislative elections confirmed the Peronist swing: the Partido Justicialista now has an absolute majority in the House of Deputies (136 seat as opposed to the earlier 125). The UCR seats have been cut by 15 to 68, while the Frepaso gained 12 seats taking them up to a total of 25.
Thus Menem triumphed on all fronts. He can now look forward to a second term of office with a comfortable majority, something the Peronists have not had since 1951, when Perón himself was president.
This victory was generally forecast, despite a certain apprehension in Menem’s ranks a few days before the election due to the surprising rise in the polls of Bordón, a dissident Peronist leading a coalition of social-democrat movements.
But the only real uncertainty was whether Menem would carry the day in the first round and thus avoid the risk of Massaccesi’s voters joining forces with Bordón’s supporters in the second round.
The Argentinian political system has been transformed, however, by the arrival of a new force – Frepaso. Apart for various coercive regimes, Argentinian politics were always dominated by a two-party system. Since the 1950s the two major parties have been the Peronist-inspired popular conservative Partido Justicialista and the Unión Cívicа Radical, a social-democrat party and the expression of the urban middle and intellectual classes.
The radical movement still led by Raúl Alfonsín, the first president to be elected democratically after the seven-year dictatorship of General Videla (1976-1983), was undoubtedly a leading player in a fundamental phase for Argentinian politics and society: the return to democracy after the tragic interlude of the dictatorship which broke on the rocks of the Malvinas (Falkland) islands.
Over and above the enthusiasm generated by the return to democracy, Alfonsín had to tackle two very difficult key problems. On one hand the disastrous economic situation, the outcome of past errors (the model of replacing imports, made the manufacturing system ill-suited to compete on the international markets), but also due to decisions made elsewhere (the Reagan monetary policy with its consequent unstoppable rise in international interest rates and the explosion of foreign debt in Latin American countries).
On the other hand was the tricky question of Argentina’s relation with its own recent past: how to heal over the wounds opened by a dictatorship responsible for the atrocious crimes and the unprecedented ferocities that gave rise to the tragedy of the desaparecidos.
How could justice be done to the mothers in Plaza de Mayo without plunging the country back into a civil war? Alfonsín’s solution was the two laws called the Obediencia Debida and the Punto Final. These laws established that soldiers could not be blamed for crimes ordered by their superiors. This criterion meant that only the top officials were blamed for the horrors of the dictatorship thus exculpating many lower officials who were definitely far from guiltless in many very serious crimes.
Although far from satisfactory this solution was accepted by most Argentinians, albeit with considerable bitterness. In that historical context the most important thing was to find a punto final so as to turn over a new leaf.
But reconstruction could not proceed because of the terrible crisis affecting the whole of the Argentinian economy, as indeed it did all Latin American countries. The economic problems of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s were so serious that any effort to stimulate economic growth inevitably led to a rise in foreign debt.
Hyperinflation at the end of Alfonsín’s term of office reached 5,000 per cent and completely suffocated the middle classes, plunging the country to levels of poverty that had been unthinkable, given the brilliant economic outlook of Argentina thirty years earlier.
Although Alfonsín’s response to the dilemma of the attitude to adopt towards the military had been controversial, the economic catastrophe on such an incredible scale even tarnished the
traditional national pride (which is quite something given the people’s proverbial touchiness) and scuppered radical hopes of a second mandate in 1989.
At this point the striking figure of Menem appeared on the scene: he had won a surprise victory over the Peronist party-man Cafiero in the primaries, which actually decided who was going to be president. Although he had already been elected governor of his home state Rioja from 1973 to 1976 and then again in 1981 (after five years of prison), this flamboyant man of Syrian origin took all the observers a little by surprise with his unusual appearance and style hardly in keeping with the stereotype of a president.
But the almost grotesque caricature of 1989 grew in stature during his term of office and turned into a credible leader. Ever popular, he gave the impression that he spent his time on the tennis courts with Vilas and Sabatini or kicking a ball with the Argentinian football team but he actually revealed great shrewdness in surrounding himself with valid experts and building up an economic system of which he was only the tip of the iceberg. The key figure in the system is the finance minister Cavallo who deserves to be credited with the Argentinian economy’s excellent performance in recent years (the GDP growth rate was around almost 50 per cent during the president’s term of office).
Cavallo’s recipe (which more denigratory observers call the ‘horse cure’ since cavallo means horse) has been to follow the fashionable neo-liberal model of the 1990s. But that is not the reason for its success. Privatisation, cuts in public spending, deregulation, the opening up of the economy to foreign capital, investment incentives, the relaunching of regional integration in the framework of Mercosur have been mainstays in the economic policy. But another key
factor has been the tying of the peso exchange rate to the dollar, a panacea for household economies still suffering from the shocks of hyperinflation and often burdened down by mortgages taken out in dollars.
The Menem administration held fast on this point even in the wake of the Mexican crisis when the so-called tequila effect’ dramatically upset the world currency markets.
As proof of the importance for public opinion of Cavallo’s monetary policy, we need only point out that Bordón, Menem’s chief rival also supported it, adopting the peso-dollar line, which
from a strictly economic point of view is certainly open to criticism. Massaccesi, on the other hand, was against it.
This kind of economic policy does, however, have a very painful counterweight – its social costs. The cutback in state’s involvement in the economy, the fall in public subsidies, rising unemployment (12 per cent plus considerable underemployment, which is stilla waste of resources) are the negative aspects of the Menem years. The sudden economic growth has not automatically generated overall wellbeing since there are no suitable sharing-out mechanisms, which are missing in all processes of economic liberalization. Argentina has
grown richer in the 1990s but poverty and inequality have also grown.
The UCR has failed to maintain a role as the main opposition to Menemism. This is partly because of the popularity of the government’s economic policy but also because of the negative view taken by most radical supporters of the choice to back Menem’s wish for constitutional reform, when he still did not have the majority at the time of the Olivos pact.
Some radical leaders accuse Alfonsin of having compromised their chances by adopting a very remissive attitude instead of putting up an open fight. But it certainly cannot be said that a different approach would have greatly influenced the outcome, given the strength of the government’s economic results.
A share of the traditional radical votes went to Bordón, who despite his Peronist background, has a policy which may be summed up in the motto ‘economic stability and political fairness’. Bordón suggested following the same economic line but accompanied by a reduction in inequality and an effective campaign against administrative corruption. It is still too early to say whether Argentina now really has a threeparty system, given the mixed nature of Frepaso and the speed of its rise.
But while Menem won the election on economic grounds, in recent weeks another great key issue has been reopеned – the drama of the desaparecidos. In 1990 Menem attempted to end the affair by offering an amnesty to the military who had been condemned for blood crimes committed during the dictatorship: as we know this only involved high-grade officials, who were held to be responsible. This measure was taken to meet the demands of the military, which continued to threatened the democratic institutions through various subversive rebellions, the most recent having been the famous revolt of the carapintadas led by Commander Aldo Rico only a year earlier.
This amnesty, however, undid rather than completed the legislative operation begun by Alfonsín, since in this way no-one paid for the heinous crimes of the seven-year dictatorship. The main culprits thus retired to a sizeable pension or left the army and returned to civilian life.
These dangerous embers were still smouldering beneath the economic euphoria. The issue violently flared up again when in the run up to the elections the head of the army, General Balza, did a televised piece of self-criticism in the name of the army, confessing the crimes that had long been suspected and leaving no room for any hope of finding the thousands of
desaparecidos. A few days later General Paulik, followed suit in the name of the air force, and the navy was to take a similar initiative.
Other officers confessed to brutal practices such as the ‘flight of death’, tortures, and the kidnapping of children.
Deep down everyone already knew these truths, but bringing them out into the open again in all their cruelty was a great shock, since the past had been anesthetized and shrouded in rather improbable doubts. The confessions of the military top brass was followed by that of the leader of the Montenera (pro-Peronist) guerrillas, Firmenich, who thus closed the circle of responsibilities in Argentina’s darkest years. The church was also subject to a great deal of criticism for not having prevented or denounced the massacres.
Despite Alfonsín and Menem’s attempts to settle the issue in one way or another, it keeps resurfacing. The trauma of those years was just too terrible.
But what objective solutions are still possible. Repealing the 1987 law with a retroactive effect appears to be fraught with difficulties, while the unconditional pardon for the culprits of the massacres is a cruel joke.
Perhaps only time alone will heal over the wounds from those years. Meanwhile it must be said that the controversy which shook Argentinian society in the run up to the elections had very little effect on the actual results.
Economic recovery seems capable of warding off the spectres of the past. But the giddy growth of recent years is now being put into perspective by the problem of inequality.
These are the key themes for Argentinian politics during Menem’s second term of office. And in fact both government and opposition focused their electoral campaigns on the struggle against unemployment and poverty. The Argentinian electorate has placed its faith in Menem, on the grounds of the previous administration’s good results, but in the second five-year period, those results must be consolidated.
If Carlos Menem wins the challenge now facing him, then perhaps it really will be possible to speak of Menemism as a new political movement with its own personality, ready to go beyond
the original Peronist matrix. It must be said that Menem’s version of Peronism departs from the original model at several points, especially as concerns ThirdWorldism and the anti-capitalist leanings which are now only to be found in a small minority of the Partido Justicialista.
Menem’s policies on the other hand are solidly anchored to free-market models and the thrust towards internationalization now dominating the world scenario.