POLITICS-ARGENTINA: Voters Feel Let down by Centre-left Alliance

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 9 2000 (IPS) - The three-year-old centre-left Alliance that has governed Argentina for the past eight months has already disappointed many voters, who hoped for faster and more in- depth social reforms.

“I expected much more from the Alliance, and what worries me is not that it has not had enough time, but that it is not as determined to change things as it had promised,” Francisco Dos Reis, who runs a small business, told IPS.

Opinion polls show that the government of Fernando de la Rúa has steadily lost support since it took office Dec 10, while the popularity of the leading representatives of the coalition comprised of the social democratic Radical Civic Union (UCR) and the centre-left ‘Frente País Solidario’ (Front for a Country with Solidarity – Frepaso) is on the decline.

De la Rúa’s ratings have slid from around 70 percent in December to as low as 40 percent today according to some polls, while a majority of survey respondents criticise his administration.

Other prominent founders of the Alliance are suffering from the same loss of support, such as the minister of social development, Graciela Fernández Meijide, one of the coalition’s most prestigious figures until late last year, whose ratings have plunged to a single-digit figure today, according to the local polling firm Analogías.

The Alliance emerged Aug 2, 1997 from an agreement between the nearly century-old UCR and Frepaso, a young coalition made up of small centre and left parties. Just two months later, the new grouping chalked up a major legislative victory over the government of Carlos Menem (1989-99).

The chief architects of the political accord were De la Rúa, the current head of the president’s cabinet Rodolfo Terragno, and former president Raúl Alfonsín (1983-89) — three leading members of the UCR — as well as Frepaso’s Fernández Meijide and Vice- President Carlos Alvarez.

Alfonsín, the only one of the five who does not form part of the government, is also the only one who has taken a critical stance and who remains popular among the Argentine public.

With the freedom provided by his position outside the government, the former president gave De la Rúa a grade of “seven” on a scale of one to 10, and complained that the president was moving too slowly in adopting the most urgently needed social reforms.

Alfonsín has criticised the government’s lack of plans for fighting poverty, which affects more than one-third of this Southern Cone country’s population of 37 million, and for combatting unemployment, which stands at 15.4 percent of the economically active population.

From the start, the Alliance said its agenda would fully and faithfully reflect the concerns of the people, with a focus on fighting unemployment, soaring crime rates, corruption, and the crisis shaking the education and health sectors, and on addressing the state’s shrinking role in social areas and the economy.

On that platform, just two months after its creation, the Alliance won more seats in Congress than the then-governing Justice (Peronist) Party.

After that, De la Rúa was elected presidential candidate in the Alliance’s primaries, and in October 1999 he won the national elections.

But since the president took office, his decisions and actions do not seem to have lived up to the expectations that the Alliance itself awakened among its followers.

The first thing the new government did was to throw its energy into addressing the severe fiscal imbalance of around 10 billion dollars inherited from Menem, by cutting the salaries of most public employees, raising taxes and pushing through reforms of the labour laws.

None of those measures were expected by the Alliance’s voters, and the leaders of the coalition themselves admitted that the decisions constituted a bitter pill that they had not believed would be necessary. Now they are asking for more time before their performance is assessed.

“Being in power has not made the centre-left turn to the right,” Vice-President Alvarez, criticised for supposedly abandoning his progressive thinking, recently quipped.

“People think fiscal balance is the exclusive patrimony of conservatives, and that’s just not true,” said Alvarez in an attempt to justify several unpopular measures. “The question of tax reforms was a bold decision, because it affects a large part of our electorate in order to rescue” the poorest of the poor, he maintained.

The government has stuck closest to its original platform in the fight against corruption and by leaving behind the superfluous spending patterns of the previous administration.

But the austerity angle, which at the start marked a sharp contrast with Menem’s high-living style, was quickly exhausted as a source of political returns.

Some officials say the Alliance simply needs more time to show what it can do. They argue that if the country recovers the confidence of foreign investors and capital begins to flow back in from abroad, the economy will start to grow once again, after a year and a half of recession, and jobs will be created.

But many are sceptical, starting with a large number of voters who say they have been let down by the Alliance and its more progressive leaders, like Alvarez and Fernández Meijide.

Alvarez, accustomed to close, direct contact with the people, admitted that he has begun to limit his outings in order to avoid running into people who upbraid him for the government’s performance. He even complained that people no longer greet him in the streets.

The coalition has begun to stem the leaking away of resources through corruption or wastefulness, and seems determined to improve the administration of public funds.

However, it is doing so by following the same economic course charted by Menem in the 1990s, and many voters believe that such a strategy stands little chance of generating employment and increasing the resources available to the state for improving education and health.

“To explain the course it has chosen, the government takes recourse to fatalistic descriptions,” said political analyst José María Pasquini. “The idea is that the legacy (of the Menem administration) is dreadful, but must be accepted because any modification would scare off capital en masse.”

If the post-Menem options were either to follow the same course or to modify it, the De la Rúa administration seems to have staked its bets on the former, and has thus immediately clashed with a society tired of stringent adjustment policies and of waiting for the “change” pledged by the Alliance.

In his 10 years in office, Menem sold off public enterprises, slashed the state payroll, threw open the economy and reined in runaway inflation. As a consequence of these structural changes, companies closed down around the nation and unemployment soared.

In July, Britain’s ‘Financial Times’ wrote of the “economic reform fatigue” in Brazil — where President Fernando Henrique Cardoso is in the middle of his second term — which, the daily said, could spread to other Southern Cone countries.

Structural adjustments have also had high social costs in Brazil, where the changes brought about in the economy have failed to compensate for the sacrifices made by those who have suffered the most from the reforms, said the article, which added that a similar situation could occur in Argentina.

Cardoso’s second term ends in 2002, and the public continues to demand social change, while big business and financial advisers recommend — as they do with De la Rúa — a deepening of neo- liberal economic policies before social demands can be addressed.

Cardoso’s popularity has also plunged, even though his government successfully overcame the crisis triggered by the January 1999 crash of the local currency, got the economy growing again in the wake of recession, increased exports and is gradually making headway against unemployment.

Experts say the big difference between Cardoso and De la Rúa is that the latter only recently took office. But voters here believe the government’s difficulties in bringing about change cannot be blamed on his short time in office.