Brazil's President Michel Temer, left, and Argentina's President Mauricio Macri, take part in a joint press conference at the government's official residence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, Oct. 3, 2016. AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko.
Economic shock therapy is back in Argentina, or at least that is a common policy description of President Mauricio Macri’s first ten months in office. Despite the catchy headlines, however, this description does not tell the whole story. Indeed, while Macri has implemented a series of far-reaching liberalization measures in open rupture with the politics of his predecessors, Cristina Fernández and Nestor Kirchner, such a change does not represent a full-blown return of the so-called “Washington Consensus”. In addition, there is not widespread agreement on whether Macri’s approach is the right one.
In other words, the policy U-turn is not accompanied by an overwhelming sense of disenchantment with the previous model – a populist leftist approach. This is why, in order to fill the gap, Macri has deployed a double strategy: on one side, he has shown himself keen to keep in place a number of acclaimed social programs adopted by the former administration, while on the other he has been attempting to portray the overall economic inheritance bequeathed by the Kirchners as a catastrophe. Lambasting one’s predecessors is not a new phenomenon in Argentinean politics, but while it was somewhat warranted following the economic crises in 1989 and 2001, this time such a calamitous depiction seems to be more driven by ideological motives than actual socio-economic disarray. In this sense, Argentina under Macri is an intense battlefield, a conflictive laboratory anticipating a bitter dispute between opposite political narratives in the whole region.
