I’m an optimist. If one year ago you had told me all the things that we would have done, people would havevoted to lock me up in an asylum.
But here we are, I’m the president”. Not exactly a phrase you would like to hear from your country’s leader, es- pecially during a period of profound crisis. In the first months of his man- date, however, Argentinian President Mauricio Macri has already proven himself to be a curious mix of humour and melancholy. Some in Argentina accuse him of being too sincere. They call him sincericídio, a slang expres- sion that combines the positive as- pects of sincerity with the destruc- tiveness of homicide and suicide. One of Macri’s predecessors, the Peronist president and liberalist Carlos Menem, whose rule was a tragic ap- petiser for the era of the cartoneros and the crisis of 2001, was accused of the same flaw.
And the similarities don’t end there: Menem set aside the traditional populist programme of Peronism and gave life to a new polit- ical economy in order to contain the hyperinflation tormenting Buenos Aires prior the 1990s, opened up competition to the international markets, sought allies in the economic estab- lishment, launched large-scale priva- tizations and pegged the peso to the dollar. He frequently utilised the Ne- cessity and Urgency Decree, which enabled him to pass legislation with- out the consent of the Congreso. And in a way, he supported the agenda of the Washington consensus, which considered Argentina to be overly pro- tectionist in certain sectors.
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I’m an optimist. If one year ago you had told me all the things that we would have done, people would havevoted to lock me up in an asylum.
