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Along with the petticoat, the Wincofon, the generalized address “usted” or the rotary telephone, ideological discussions only seem to have a peaceful museological survival in store for them in the realm of nostalgia. Perhaps it is too forceful to repeat that ideologies are dead.. But in the local agora, ideological debate of medium depth as an essential input of daily politics is not abundant. Millennials and centennials testify to this better than anyone. It has not been reported that discussing the dictatorship of the proletariat or the class struggle in the 21st century would have modified the amount of adrenaline released by the adrenal glands of any parishioner. Because it closed permanently, the replacement does not include the mythical La Paz café, on whose napkins endless failed revolutions were dreamed of in so many enlightened late nights.
There is, of course, a trivialization of ideologies that social media is busy making flashy. President Javier Milei himself uses the label of communist as an insult, something not far removed from Nicolás Maduro’s habit of calling fascists those who criticize the Venezuelan dictatorship or from the even more absurd epithet of Nazis that Putin reserves for Ukrainians to mask his own imperial impetus.
In Argentina, ideological frameworks are particularly diffuse (except for Trotskyists, cursillistas and other irreducible dogmatists of enduring purity) in line with unstable parties. They are no longer even called parties. They are called “spaces.” A loose term that does not appear in any Argentine law. The reality of the legal system is as divorced as politics from systems of ideas and values maintained over time, beyond the existence, it is true, of some subliminal identity marks both in people and in groups.
From time to time, some borderline “ideological” problem is raised in the exchange of labels. These discussions were common around the figure of Carlos Menem, no longer about his Peronist identity but about the supposed inaccuracy of the neoliberal moniker. Former members of Ucedé discuss tirelessly about liberal and libertarian authenticity. In that part of the spectrum, litigation has multiplied since La Libertad Avanza, a party with no history, came to power.
But now the most popular of these discussions has just been answered, the qualities necessary to be a Peronist. And it happened around someone unexpected, the supposedly most right-wing figure in Argentina. Although Peronism is the party with the most members in the country, at this point nobody cares too much, because it is also a movement and has a strong religious component. To gain membership, self-perception matters much more than documents and the opinion of members. You have to feel Peronist to be one, it is often said behind closed doors.
There is no evidence that Victoria Villarruel has any intention of ceasing to feel proud as the number two of the libertarian government to become a colleague, but former vice president Cristina Kirchner, her predecessor, He just gave her a thumbs down as if she were an applicant who submitted the application. The first “ideological” test, albeit with a welcoming tone, was made during a journalistic interview by the Kirchnerist senator José Mayans. It was in these terms: “Villarruel is ideologically a little closer to us than to Milei.” Without wasting a second, Cristina Kirchner tweeted: “We are going to ask those who say that Villarruel is a Peronist for a psychiatric examination.”
It was a particularly striking tweet. Firstly, because of the penalty that the leader chose for those who make evaluative errors related to the measurement of Peronism in blood. Whether it is irony, a supposed joke, a literal warning or an excuse to show that the thumb that rules is hers, Cristina Kirchner used psychiatric pathology in a stigmatizing way as a weapon of severe political disqualification after being the one who suffered the most from it as president. She always said that she was attacked for being a woman, a bias that is even more unprovable when one observes that Milei also receives continuous political attacks in the format of psychiatric problems (almost always inflicted, by the way, by Kirchnerists). As for the rest, it is not so clear what sacred ideology Cristina Kirchner claims to guard. whether Peronist or Kirchnerist.
It is striking that the recipient of the reproach is the president of one of the blocks of senators that Kirchnerism has. An anti-abortion Catholic very close to the eternal governor of Formosa Gildo Insfrán, Mayans was until now one of Cristina Kirchner’s main operators in the Senate, where he has occupied his seat for 23 years. Yesterday the tone of the dispute rose: “What do we do with those who put Alberto Fernández as president of the party, “Do we send them to the psychiatric hospital too?”. A bravado that seems very harsh but it is not. Mayans reproaches him for having appointed Fernández as president of the party, something of no great importance to the majority of Argentines, who are now regretting that Cristina Kirchner appointed Fernández. as president of the country, not the party.
Kirchnerism and the left are the sectors that most strongly supported the accusation against Villarruel of being a “denialist,” “defender of genocides,” and “Videlista.” And suddenly Kirchnerism finds itself discussing whether Villarruel is or is not a Peronist. Inconsistencies, one could say in the language of the AFIP.
Initial analyses indicate that an internal dispute has erupted between Cristina Kirchner and Mayans, reflecting the loss of power of the leader of Kirchnerism and preceding the realignment of some of her unconditional supporters. Has the time come to cut ties? But the facts also reveal the lack of rigor in questions of ideological pretension, which are actually opportunism and power struggles. This has already occurred throughout the political spectrum, which explains the constant migration of leaders, but in Peronism the process always seems to be more crude, something that perhaps should be attributed, paradoxically, to the to the ideological plasticity that characterizes it.
What would Victoria Villarruel lack to be a Peronist? Militarism, like the one imposed by the creator, of course not. Nationalism either. Does she have too much Videlism? Wasn’t the governor of Buenos Aires, Victorio Calabró, more Videlista than her, one of the most important Peronists in 1976, accused of supporting the coup? And what about all the so-called Peronist right that governed the country after the fall of Cámpora, including Perón in the third presidency?
What Mayans has just stated publicly – he also did so when he joked with Villarruel in the middle of the session about “little ham” – is that he is a negotiator who, of course, negotiates with the president of the chamber. “We need to deepen our friendship”he told her, knowing that he was being watched by television cameras.
In a normal democracy, no one would have given that joke any importance. But ours is not normal: he wavers between saying the worst things about the vice president and one day speculating about making her his own.
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