The Peronist phoenix – 10/26/2023 – Maria Hermínia Tavares

In 1998, the respected Argentine historian Tulio Alperin Donghi published “La Lar Agonia de la Argentina Peronista”. In it, he argued that the society shaped by the social welfare policies of Juan Domingo Perón’s first government (1945-1955) was becoming unviable.

Since then, with ups and downs in the economy and alternation in power between Peronists and different opponents, the margins to maintain the standard of living of the mass of Argentines without producing uncontrolled inflation have become increasingly narrow. The country was slowly becoming impoverished. (Still, our neighbors’ per capita income remains much higher than ours.)

It makes sense that many people, after each lost election – 1989, 1998, 2015 – rushed to predict the end of Peronism with political force. They did it again now and once again they made a mistake. The results of the first round of the presidential elections on Sunday, 10/22, show something else. Sergio Massa, Union for the Fatherland candidate, came out ahead, despite his movement’s worst performance since the country’s redemocratization in 1983.

Everywhere, the voter’s choice is conditioned by the supply of candidates; and many tend to be the circumstances that determine it. But it makes sense to ask what reasons would explain the longevity of Peronism, when in the last 30 years the change in the opposite camp has been notable – from Alfonsin to the vociferous right of Bullrich and Milei.

There are those who attribute it to the original capacity of justicialism, as Juan Domingo named his movement, to organize workers into powerful unions, and give them their own identity and space in the national political game. And when unionism lost strength, Peronism took advantage of its ability to build, through social policies, an extensive clientelistic network, as political scientist Steve Levitsky demonstrated in “Transforming labor-based parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in comparative perspective” (Transforming worker-based parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in comparative perspective).

But there are those who believe that their resilience comes from the ability to change according to circumstances. This is the case of writer Martin Caparrós. He argues that since its advent, almost 80 years ago, Peronism has been above all a machine aimed at maintaining power that has been “Mussolinian nationalist, workerist and resistant, Guevarist, social-democratic, Christian-democratic, neoliberal – and several more things.”

Win or lose in the second round on November 19, another of these metamorphoses is likely to occur.

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