ARGENTINA: President Kirchner, from Crisis to Reconstruction

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 24 2005 (IPS) - Argentine President Néstor Kirchner has often said that he took office during a crisis that was so severe that he had to govern "minute by minute". But on Wednesday he reaches the halfway point in his four-year term with an economy in full recovery mode, and his challenge now is to make it last, say analysts.

"After the crisis, Kirchner brought about economic stability and generated the sensation that Argentina has a future," said sociologist Gerardo Adrogué, director of Knack, a public opinion consultancy.

Adrogué told IPS that now that the economy has been stabilised and "the haemorrhage" of unemployment and poverty (which at one point affected nearly 60 percent of the population of 37 million) has been stanched, the aim should be "to reconstruct an effective state, capable of implementing public policies through an honest bureaucracy that knows how to run things."

There is apparently no shortage of public support. In a survey by the Equis polling firm, 60 percent of respondents said they held a positive view of the government. Another firm, Analogías, found that 83 percent of those interviewed had a "favourable or very favourable" image of the government, and that 74 percent believed the country "is better off" with Kirchner.

"No Argentine president since 1983 had approached the first electoral test of his administration with such a high rating," said Adrogué, referring to the Oct. 23 legislative elections that will be the first national poll faced by the current Justicialista (Peronist) Party government.

The president has stated that the elections will serve as a "plebiscite" on his performance – a strategy that Adrogué described as clever. "He has a strong chance of ‘winning’ the elections, and wants to receive the support now that he did not obtain when he was elected president," said the analyst.

In April 2003, Kirchner took 22 percent of the vote, coming in second in a first round of voting that was led by former president Carlos Menem (1989-1999), who garnered 24.3 percent.

But a large proportion of the population was staunchly opposed to Menem, and to avoid almost certain defeat, he withdrew from the runoff against Kirchner.

That means that in effect, Kirchner took office in May 2003 with a mere 22 percent support, in a country where the economy had collapsed in late 2001 after several years of recession, the unemployment and poverty rates had climbed to unprecedented levels, Argentina had defaulted on most of its foreign debt, thousands of account-holders had their savings frozen in the banks, and 14 different provincial currencies were circulating, alongside the peso.

The public had lost all confidence in the country’s political class, and the arrival of an unknown – Kirchner was a former governor of the southern province of Santa Cruz – who had taken such a small share of the vote made the future look even more uncertain.

But the new president, reaching decisions "minute by minute", began to chalk up significant achievements.

Almost immediately, popular support for the new government began to grow, and by the end of his first year in office, Kirchner’s popularity ratings had skyrocketed to four times the proportion of votes he took in the elections.

Gross domestic product (GDP), which had shrunk 20 percent between 1999 and 2002, grew 8.7 percent in 2003 and nine percent in 2004. The unemployment rate dropped from 17.8 to 13 percent, and the poverty rate fell from a record high of 57.5 percent in 2002 to 40.2 percent last year.

The debt on which Argentina had defaulted in late 2001 was restructured this year, with 76 percent of bondholders agreeing to the swap.

Tax collection increased, as did investment, exports and consumption. Wages and pensions also rose slightly, while prices were kept in check despite a small outbreak of inflation earlier this year.

Protests and roadblocks staged by organisations of the unemployed, which had become the foremost mode of social protest after 2000, began to give way to demonstrations by organised workers demanding higher wages and better working conditions.

On the political front, Kirchner backed the congressional decision to annul the amnesty laws passed in the mid to late 1980s, which had put an end to prosecutions of members of the military who committed human rights violations during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

He also restructured the leadership of the armed forces and the police, and put in place a transparent process for appointing Supreme Court judges.

But without downplaying the significance of these moves, Adrogué insists that the Kirchner administration’s greatest achievement has been the return to economic stability.

"And even though not everyone understands the technical details, Argentines approve of the tough stance the president took in renegotiating the foreign debt," the analyst added.

The director of the Analogías polling firm, Analía del Franco, told IPS that Kirchner was able to establish "emotional ties" with society, which enabled him to restore the lost legitimacy of the presidency.

"Argentines want leaders who lead, and that need became extreme after the crisis," said the analyst, who added that Kirchner fulfilled that popular demand. "Now, the objective should be to transfer that confidence to the country’s institutions, in order to strengthen the system itself."