Argentina Looks to a New Leader
<a href=www.nytimes.com>nytimes.com May 25, 2003 By LARRY ROHTER
BUENOS AIRES, May 24 — In the past 18 months, Argentina's enduring political and economic crisis has consumed five presidents and plunged millions of people into poverty. Now it is Néstor Kirchner's turn to try to set things right, and the demands for a new direction are more insistent than ever.
After hitting bottom, leaving a fifth of the work force unemployed and thousands of businesses bankrupt, the economy at least has begun to bounce back. But Mr. Kirchner, 53, will take office on Sunday with the country's future still clouded, Argentines' faith in institutions and leaders shattered and the deeper moral malaise that underlies and fuels the crisis very much intact.
What is not yet clear to Argentines, though, is whether Mr. Kirchner, the obscure Peronist governor of a remote province until he was catapulted into power in an unlikely turn of events, is the great reformer and renovator he claims to be or just another slick politician who will let the country down.
Mr. Kirchner finished second in the first round of the presidential election late last month, capturing just 22 percent of the vote. He was to have faced a former president, Carlos Menem, in a runoff on May 18. But Mr. Kirchner won by default when Mr. Menem withdrew, alarmed by opinion polls that showed him losing by more than 40 percentage points and hoping to discredit Mr. Kirchner's victory.
"This country must change because it desperately, urgently needs to change," said Marcelo Blanco, a 36-year-old graphic designer who voted for Mr. Kirchner in the first round of the election last month. "The expectations are great, but we don't know if Kirchner is going to be up to the challenge."
The departing interim president, Eduardo Duhalde, has sought to assuage those doubts, describing Mr. Kirchner last week as "a fresh breeze blowing up from Patagonia." Mr. Kirchner has also stoked the hopes for renewal by appointing a cabinet notable for its youth.
"Kirchner has a historic opportunity to break with the past, rebuild this country with a new model and initiate a new era," said Roberto Bacman, a pollster and sociologist here. The social contract that held the country together during the 1990's has fallen to pieces, Mr. Bacman said, with nothing to replace it.
In a regional context, Mr. Kirchner is part of a broader move to the left, beginning with the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998. The leftist movement gathered force in the last year with the election of two other candidates sharply critical of the political and economic status quo — in Brazil and Ecuador — and the emergence of similar forces in Bolivia, Peru and Uruguay.
"The agenda of demands has changed, and Latin American electorates are turning from center-right to center-left," said Graciela Romer, a political consultant who works both here and in other countries of the region. "If the 90's were marked by a rejection of state intervention, today people want a greater presence of the state and a greater focus on social services."
The shift in attitudes can be felt in places like Quilmes, a once thriving industrial center south of the capital that has been left despondent and nearly destitute by Mr. Menem's decade-long experiment with free market policies. Factories there have been abandoned to crumble, shuttered stores are festooned with "for rent" signs and the mood is so glum that the mayor has been reduced to putting up posters that urge, "Let's get Quilmes back on its feet."
Yet there is also support for Mr. Kirchner and the hope that he can somehow bring better times. "If they'll just let him govern, maybe we can get out of this mess," said Júlio Álvarez, 37, a former factory worker who now sells scarves on the platform of the local train station. The "they" he cited referred to the others within the Peronist party, labor unions and the business elite who have supported Mr. Menem and benefited from his government.
"We need to believe, to be able to support something and to think that he is going to be able to do it," said Nora Cuéllar, a 40-year-old nurse. "We don't want to go back to the past, to presidents who are dishonest and rob the country blind or who are so weak they don't finish out their term of office."
Because he led an interim government, installed by congressional decree at the peak of the crisis in January 2002 after President Fernando de la Rúa resigned, Mr. Duhalde postponed many decisions on pressing economic and social issues. That means the tests will come early and often for Mr. Kirchner, beginning with negotiations with the International Monetary Fund to achieve a long-term accord that would allow investment and credit to resume.
In newspaper interviews this week, he minimized the importance of reaching such an agreement early on. "Argentina has already shown it can survive without an I.M.F. deal," he said. The economy, he added, "has little or no chance of paying the amounts sought" by creditors.
He has also taken a tough stance on corruption and human rights. He has indicated that he favors reopening impeachment proceedings against a Supreme Court that is seen as loyal to Mr. Menem and has presented himself as a representative of the generation that was brutalized under the old military dictatorship and now wants justice.
"This is a time bomb for the military," Mr. Bacman said, adding that Mr. Kirchner "can't find anybody to take the Army commander's post because so many of the military are worried about" the possibility that legal proceedings could be reopened against people accused of human rights offenses during the dictatorship more than two decades ago.
Today, newspapers here reported that Mr. Kirchner has decided to force the retirement of more than half of the armed forces' generals and admirals.
Because Mr. Duhalde decided to leave office nearly seven months early, the country must also face congressional, mayoral and gubernatorial elections in the next few months. While that gives Mr. Kirchner an opportunity to strengthen his support in a divided Congress, he has little in the way of patronage to offer potential adherents, and some of the country's powerful provincial governors are already expressing misgivings about him.
There is an old saying here that the country's dominant Peronist party always quarrels during an election and then makes up in order to divide the spoils. But the party had never been through an election like the last one, in which internal differences forced it to run three candidates.
"In Néstor Kirchner, Peronism has its last chance," said Joaquín Morales Solá, a columnist for the conservative daily La Nación. "If he has a fairly decent administration, they will remain united. But if Kirchner fails, the conditions for fragmentation and fracture are there."
Mr. Menem has made it clear that he intends to make life as difficult as possible for the new president. He remains the nominal Peronist party leader and has predicted that Mr. Kirchner will not survive his four-year term and that the country will again turn to Mr. Menem.
But Mr. Menem's own actions have reduced his capacity to make mischief. He is despised not only for having run the economy into the ground during his decade in power, but also for having quit this election when it became obvious he would suffer a humiliating loss.
Mr. Duhalde, Mr. Kirchner's nominal ally, is a more serious concern, political analysts here say. Mr. Duhalde, 61, has said he will never run for executive office again, but he remains the boss of the Peronist party machine in Buenos Aires Province, without which Mr. Kirchner could not have been elected.
"Of the old-school politicians, Duhalde is the only one who has anything left, and that is because he leaves the country in better condition than he received it," Mr. Morales Solá said. "Kirchner is going to need Duhalde, whose strategy has always been to wait until he is needed and then — well, everything has its price in politics."
Nonetheless, Mr. Kirchner has made it clear he wants to shake things up. Asked in interviews with Argentine news organizations whom he views as role models, he said that Bill Clinton was the American president of the past 50 years that he admires most and expressed admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the way he pulled the United States out of a depression that threatened both the stability and prosperity of a democracy.
"Let's hope Kirchner can really turn out to be the Argentine Clinton," said Mr. Blanco, the graphic designer. "And we could certainly use a New Deal here."