So you wanted some entertainment and you got it. At least for a hundred days Argentina was that cool wild place you would watch on CNN every once in a while falling apart. It was about time to kick the good times goodbye and have them cede way to some real Peronista-style politics and some fellow-countrymen backstabbing.
It is also true that one hundred days is just a tiny bit too long for one single topic, isn’t it?
Blame it on the passion. The passion you cherish in tango or football is the same emotional distortion that could suddenly turn porteños – and every single Argentine for that matter – into experts on soybean, wheat, corn, milk and the fundamental dynamics of the world’s commodity markets.
True, it is better to talk rubbish about soccer than about world economics, isn’t it? Thank goodness the Olympic Games are here.
Argentina has entered the calm that succeeds the storm. The storm that came from the world famous pampas in the form of soy-rich farmers on tax rebellion mode has seemingly passed, and you won’t hear pot-banging in the city or tractors wielding Argentine flags on the roads for a while. But as the dust settles down, it is still hard to assess how much damage it was really caused to the mother ship of Argentina’s latest political trick: Kirchnerism.
If it was weird enough for a husband to pass on the presidential honours to his wife – both elected – in a manifestation of political love reportedly unheard of the history of the whole world, nobody expected Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the first female to be ever elected as head of the state here, to descend to the league of beleaguered politicians in so short a time. Don’t look for any simplistic explanations: there are none. And there will be none for quite some time. Any Argentine – young, old or in the middle – would still be unable to give you a sound or convincing explanation about what a political experiment called Peronism was all about over six decades ago.
Is it Cristina Fernández’s fault if Argentines in the ranks of the middle class do no like the way she talks? Is that really important? One thing for certain: this lady (former first) has been in the public limelight for years and the way she talks has not changed a thing in the process. Is the president to blame for the chauvinism of Argentine women, who in their vast majority (at least among the urban, semi-elite crowd you and I mingle with) tell you they have a gut thing against the president?
Argentines have wasted lots of time many times in the past caring about form rather than substance. A man called Jorge Videla was described by the press of the time (yes, the same papers you might read these days, Clarín, La Nación and those guys… no, The Argentina Independent was not around yet) as a good mannered and well-educated gentleman. While he threw a World Cup football party, thousands disappeared, never to be seen again. In the 1990s, a man that international news agencies described as ‘flamboyant’ played sport or did the belly dance on TV while the country was being auctioned for peanuts and sovereign debt swelling three-fold.
Beware when you hear your average Argentine calling a president voted in just nine months ago ‘arrogant’, ‘frivolous’ or simply ‘a bitch’. Something may be cooking. And the calm that succeeded the storm might precede a debacle.