LATIN AMERICA: TWO CHEERS (AND A PRAYER) FOR ARGENTINE DEMOCRACY
Corradi, Juan E.
Over the past 30 years, Argentina has gone through four political phases in a downward spiral. Between PerOn's ouster in 1955 and 1966 it had an unstable and exclusionary democracy, interrupted...
...Why then had Peronism not become a socialdemocratic force...
...Life became a war of all against all, with pockets of order under strongmen waging vendettas against each other...
...1) For the first time in almost 40 years, the outcome at the polls was not a foregone conclusion...
...The platforms and proposals of the major parties were not, however, substantially different...
...For many a month of shame and bitterness after the defeat in the South Atlantic war, with the sudden realization that the country was near bankruptcy, and the slower awakening to the crimes and corruption of the military leaders, Argentines felt condemned— not destined—to democracy, largely because they could not see it as anything but a new turn of past failures...
...IN sum, far from being a new rendition of the past, the situation in Argentina now seemed close to a major political change...
...Therefore, one could conclude that a more labor-centered Peronism might not be credible enough to present itself, as it had done, as the embodiment of the Argentine nation...
...The polls suggested that Peronism was losing the multiclass support that had accounted for its strength as a popular movement...
...This time, the polls showed a parity of strength between Peronism and the Radical party...
...President Alfonsin will have a hard time satisfying the crisscrossing demands of a motley alliance...
...Argentina developed haphazardly...
...Jacobo Timerman said precisely that in an Op-Ed piece...
...This search for respectability, which was not shared by noisier populist sectors of the party, seemed in line with the trend that was pushing Peronism into becoming just another, albeit still important, political force...
...While Peronists seek, with difficulty, to adapt to the new situation, the Radical party will also be tested in the months ahead...
...Like the French workers who remain loyal to the Communists—despite Poland, the Gulag, and "democratic centralism"—there are popular sectors in Argentina that will continue to tolerate the vices of Peronism, that will feel represented by populist and authoritarian leaders, and that will even see in the abhorrence of union bossism among democratic and progressive sectors (an attitude sometimes blending easily with middle- and upper-class prejudice) a confirmation of their proletarian authenticity...
...Thus the elections represent not only a reconstitution of political forces in terms more favorable to democratic politics but a profound symbolic break with the past...
...It had been both the vehicle for the organization of labor and a heterogeneous, charismatic movement...
...The only way out of this jungle was a solemn democratic covenant...
...In the parliamentary elections of 1985, this bloc will again range itself behind its natural candidates...
...Faced with the Peronist onslaught, these groups have tended to secede from open politics and knock at the army barracks' door...
...Such a feat was made possible by the maintenance of the traditional middle-class Radical constituency, 3 by a massive swing of undecided voters in Alfonsin's favor, by a significant portion of "borrowed" voters from the right and center-right, and last but not least, by a good number of Peronistas deciding not to vote for their party this time...
...The rallying cry of "one nation, under law" is steadily replacing the catchwords of nostalgia and revenge...
...4 Despite deep rifts, prudence has counseled Peronist bosses against open bickering and self-reexamination, lest the party weaken itself further...
...PERONISM WILL NOT VANISH.4 In all likelihood, it will survive the recent debacle, but with clearer and more restricted boundaries...
...3 Here too there was an important break with the past: the middle-class youth, which ten years ago became radicalized and which, inspired by rather shoddy and violent revolutionary utopias, rallied around Peronism, this time endorsed the moderate and legalistic platform of the Radicales...
...elections were devious...
...a diversification of working-class, middle- and upper-class political preferences...
...The main political movement was undemocratic...
...and the vacuum was filled by authoritarian minorities...
...The 203 Argentine working class was mature...
...It is difficult to say if this is a temporary or a permanent shift in Argentine politics...
...The Radicales will have to counteract this centrifugal trend by a stiff competition with the Peronists for the white-collar and skilled blue-collar vote...
...Argentina has not had cohesive center and center-right parties as effective counterweights to the labor organizations...
...Their dictatorship left a deplorable record of repression, economic mismanagement, and military incompetence...
...It is a process to be attacked piecemeal...
...These were not insurmountable barriers to democracy...
...and the appearance of a new democratic left...
...Many who cast their vote for him did it in repudiation of the Peronists, not out of confidence in Alfonsin...
...This trend indicated that, even if the Peronists won, Argentines now would finally have surmounted a period of overwhelming Peronist domination...
...Many seemed kindled by the spirit of revenge...
...Tyranny left a legacy of fear...
...The union leaders preferred an aggressive campaign, but their candidate Luder tried to project an image of order and civility, hoping to dispel the memories of the Peronists' disastrous performance in power under Isabel Peron...
...The armed forces seized power again in 1976...
...By a peculiar ruse of reason, the same arrogance of power that left many bereaved, others ashamed, and the majority poorer caused the ruin of the dictators...
...These considerations fail to capture the intense sense of relief that the outcome of the elections has produced in Argentina's collective consciousness...
...The reasons for such despondency had deep roots in the past...
...The political future of the Radical party and the country may, to a considerable extent, depend on that effort...
...He may then lure into his fold an important bloc of skilled workers who still voted Peronist...
...Argentines could look back only to a tradition of intolerance and opportunism...
...2 In the two presidential elections of 1973, the Radicals had obtained 21.3 percent and 24.4 percent of the votes...
...q 206...
...Only if the political campaign revealed a strong political center, would democracy have a chance in Argentina...
...They have a point...
...The exercise of formal democracy no longer meant repeating a feared and tattered script...
...The 52 percent of the vote that swept him into office may dwindle as he governs...
...And this seemed reason enough to sound a note of cautious optimism: it was possible to begin thinking of an end to a 40-year cycle of disruption and despair...
...An independent judiciary, transpartisan commissions, and religious leaders have been given a large role as custodians of civil society...
...Old ghosts were being revived...
...Luder wanted to draw votes from the middle sectors, without which he could hardly win...
...His chances seem to lie in following the strategy that he successfully pursued as a candidate, which consisted of raiding the margins of Peronism...
...Whether Argentines would arrive at such a covenant was contingent on two factors: the balance of constraints and opportunities, and the formation of a new collective will...
...To be sure, the election outcome would not dissipate the pressing problems facing the country: the need to refinance a staggering foreign debt, the legal and moral imperative to account for the fate of thousands of desaparecidos, the necessity to institute civilian control over the army, the challenge to find an honorable solution to pending international conflicts...
...But a hard core will endure, impervious to change...
...The result was a juxtaposition of diverse pressure groups, conscious of their special interests but oblivious to the common good...
...As soon as elections were announced, the traditional political parties started a process of internal reorganization...
...For the first time in decades these images of civility seem credible...
...Balbin had kept control of the party until his death in 1981, after which Alfonsin rapidly stepped in...
...Barring a dramatic reorganization, it may in fact become a traditional ethnopolitical subculture...
...Peronists argue that at least they have a reliable political base, whereas Alfonsin has gathered around him a disparate constituency...
...eanwhile the Alfonsin administration has the opportunity to enforce and guarantee a truly democratic covenant, based on the new president's conviction that Argentina needs political craftsmen, not officers or technocrats, at the helm...
...2 Before October 30, 1983, any Americans who took their news from the New York Times probably inferred that Argentine political habits had not changed—that PerOn, dead, still continued to command the political destiny of Argentina...
...Without a reconstituted political center, the unions and regiments would continue to act as surrogates of parties...
...But it seemed that a condition for tackling these problems was to recreate democratic conviviality in a country that had long suffered from its absence...
...He can do so only through an active policy of social reforms...
...After the surrender at Port Stanley on June 14, 1982, the generals' days in power were numbered...
...After his death, the country was in shambles...
...but the labor organization was pyramidal, had a single political allegiance, and weighed massively on the political process...
...In all likelihood, it was the switch in allegiance of this last group that produced such a pronounced difference in favor of Alfonsin...
...What makes an event stand out in the history of a community is the realization—by the actors and after the fact—that they have crossed an invisible threshold...
...If the junta's self-destruction was unmistakable, the orderly passage to democracy was much less clear...
...In 1966 the military suspended politics indefinitely, supposedly to spur development...
...The society was rarely governed by law...
...The campaign showed that the political initiative had shifted...
...Partly because of three internal reasons: the domination of unions by authoritarian barons...
...The bloc of votes (19 percent) that in the national elections of 1973—the last before the military interregnum—went to right-wing candidates, was cast in 1983 in favor of Alfonsin...
...Nobody would make such claims about labor organizations in Sweden, Great Britain, or West Germany...
...The Peronists were proscribed...
...and the governments had largely fictitious mandates...
...Since its irruption in 1946, Peronism had been the principal electoral force...
...205 Some Peronists who banked, in the past, on the almost automatic capacity of their movement to win elections, will now seek other watering holes...
...New political actors were not yet visible...
...Until it looked at itself in the mirror of elections, the new majority had thought it was a minority...
...Despite the relatively peaceful Peronist reorganization, there were strong tensions within that party...
...There has been a profound transvaluation of values in this strategic sector of society...
...The party system seemed battered...
...2) Almost ten years after PerOn's death in 1974, its effects began to make themselves felt...
...A sign of this change was the internal reorganization of the party, with union leaders seizing key positions, while reserving a symbolic place for the political cadres represented by the presidential Alfonsin was a dissenting voice within his party since 1966, when he first challenged the more traditional, "national" line of the older Radical leader Balbin...
...Under such sorry circumstances, democracy came to appear as an imperative, since other solutions had proved disastrous...
...The difference was rather in the style, in the shifting involvements of such sectors as the middle-class youth, and in the emergence of a new and younger leader, the Radical Raid Alfonsin.' Under Alfonsin's leadership the old Radical party—a middle-class, middle-of-the-road mass party that had dominated the political scene from 1916 through 1930—turned the tables on the Peronists by projecting an image of change and renewal...
...Peronism still seemed the major political force...
...The risks are many...
...A popular subculture fed by an undercurrent of resentment will remain an important component of Peronism, just as Peronists will remain a dominant political force in the backward provinces of our vast, uneven country...
...Between PerOn's ouster in 1955 and 1966 it had an unstable and exclusionary democracy, interrupted by military coups...
...The latter, under the leadership of Raid Alfonsin, became a serious electoral alternative...
...3) The sense that a traditional political mold was about to break was confirmed by the election campaign...
...The ballot was only one weapon among many...
...the democratic parties did not command majorities...
...Another answer lay outside of Peronism...
...What were the obstacles and opportunities for democracy when the political campaign started in mid-1983...
...It will have to submit next to the political justice of the constitutional regime...
...In the presidential race, Alfonsin won by the unprecedented margin (for a party other than the Peronist) of 52 percent...
...The task of defusing the explosive mix fell on PerOn, winner of free elections in 1973-18 years after he had been deposed...
...The ensuing social tensions brought down the regime in 1972...
...The first order of business will be to create a system of government that can do justice to a complex society...
...But in the end, Argentina may well contemplate these pleasing prospects: the taming and containment of authoritarian populism...
...Power accumulated outside institutions, in a sort of political black market from which it burst in wild actions and reactions...
...As of this writing, a first decisive step has been taken: the military has been forced to surrender power and internal security functions to civilian control...
...Since 1930, a fragmented Argentine establishment has lacked the will and imagination to organize itself for democratic politics...
...Every time free elections were held, it had vindicated that title...
...As the campaign gathered momentum, however, many acted against this dark self-understanding and broke the spell...
...Affiliation to the two major parties reached record proportions, indicating a strong thirst for involvement on the part of the population...
...The South Atlantic war was an international tragedy of errors starring a full cast of right-wing actors...
...Instead, it was becoming the political expression of a narrower though still important constituency, based on the organized working class...
...All parties seem to agree on common norms of behavior for the sake of political stability...
...a more balanced political party system...
...a greater role for skilled political brokers in various parties...
...Still, many observers doubted that this new momentum would suffice to overcome the long-standing handicaps of the Radicales...
...Changing these features would not be impossible, but it would be a project for the longer run, falling on a new generation of labor leaders and Peronist politicians...
...204 candidate Italo Luder...
...But Peron could not tame the forces that had brought him back to power: the unions, the masses, the radicalized middle sectors, and a revolutionary youth prone to terrorism...
...Despite the severe constraints imposed by the economic crisis, a judicious reactivation of the productive apparatus and antidepression measures may transform a plebiscitarian event into a durable coalition...
...the integration of labor and nonlabor sectors of Peronism, not into a modern party structure, but into a populist movement under a Fiihrerprinzip...
...Past mishaps made it seem, however, a choice by default...
...and a corporatist style of negotiation with other political and social forces...
...To others who were watching the weekly polls from Buenos Aires, three trends suggested a more nuanced picture...
...It is, at the least, an important occasion...
Vol. 31 • April 1984 • No. 2
