Néstor Kirchner And The Politics Of Fear

Former Argentine President this week has twice appealed to Argentines’ worst fears by saing that if they don’t vote for the ruling Frente Para La Victoria Party in June’s congressional election the country will “explode.”

In a firey campaign speech Tuesday night, Kirchner put it this way:

“If on June 28 Cristina doesn’t have a legislative majority, we’ll return to that country of 2001. We’ll return to unemployment. We’ll return to indigence. We’ll return to poverty and we’ll return to that Argentina that explodes,” Kirchner said, demonstrating that his appeal is to the lowest common denominator and not to the highest hopes and aspirations of average Argentines.

Kirchner’s approach to politics is the antithesis of that practiced by one of his wife’s favorite politicians, U.S. President Barack Obama. Obama always appealed to his constituents’ highest hopes. He sought to lift his voters to a new plane, calling on them not to be better than each other but to be better than themselves.

“I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours,” Obama said.

Contrast that appeal to an elevated, hopeful, can-do – “Yes we can” – mentality to Kirchner’s appeal to peoples’ worst fears. The appeal, I would imagine to many voters, is entirely unappealing. It smacks of desperation, analysts say, but to others it is simply an accurate description of reality.

“How could we have advanced all these years without a majority in Congress,” Kirchner’s wife, President Cristina Fernandez, asked rhetorically in a speech Wednesday. Fernandez criticized the media for portraying her husband’s comments as anything less than a brave statement of the truth.

“So why do people get angry when the ex president describes this situation? Those who want to be in the majority were in the government in 2001. These are the people that cut retirees’ pension benefits by 13%, who voted to change a labor law in which bribes were involved. These are the same people. When the ex president refers to governability, he’s not using a rhetorical trick. It’s just a description of reality.”

But Kirchner’s former cabinet chief and longtime political ally, Alberto Fernandez, was highly critical of his former boss. “If by losing an election we return to 2001, then everything we have done (since the Kirchners came to power) has been a failure,” he said.

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