ARGENTINA: Milei faces huge protest march

ARGENTINA: Milei faces huge protest march

Thank you for reading LatinNews' chosen article from the Latin American Weekly Report - 25 April 2024


President Javier Milei faced one of the biggest marches of recent times in Argentina on 23 April just over four months after taking office. The march was organised in defence of the country’s public universities, which claim that they lack sufficient funds to function in the second semester, and to protest against the government’s fiscal adjustment and austerity measures. Milei seized upon the participation of prominent opposition politicians and trade unionists, however, to maintain that “the same old people” were intent on “profiting at the expense of the Argentine people”.

The national daily La Nación estimated, based on drone footage, that some 430,000 demonstrators took to the streets in the city of Buenos Aires, a figure between the 800,000 claimed by organisers and the 150,000 put out by the police. Protests were not confined to the capital. More than 50,000 protesters marched in Córdoba and some 20,000 in Mendoza; there were also big protest marches in Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires province, and Rosario in Santa Fe.

“We have reached March 2024 with a budget based on spending from September 2022,” the president of the Federación Universitaria Argentina (FUA), Piera Fernández de Piccoli, said. She said that the 70% funding increase made available by the government for March and the additional 70% promised in talks last week were “insufficient” with inflation approaching 300%. This contradicted the claim of the presidential spokesperson, Manuel Adorni, that the budget matter had been “resolved” with an accord signed last week with public universities.

Opposition accused of co-opting protests

Adorni claimed that the government was entirely supportive of the “legitimate” demands made by students before criticising opposition politicians by name, trade unions, and piquetero social movements for seeking to “harm the government’s legitimacy”. Milei, whose antipathy to public universities (he went to a private university) is well-documented, describing them as breeding grounds for “socialist propaganda”, denied the day after the massive protests that his government had any intention of leaving them short of funds, merely that it would “audit how they are used”. He railed against opposition politicians who participated in the protests, saying they wanted to “prevent Argentina from changing to defend their privileges”.

Some political opponents did take part in the protests in the capital. Foremost among these were the Peronist governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof; Milei’s defeated Peronist rival in the presidential elections, Sergio Massa; and the president of the centre-right Unión Cívica Radical (UCR), Senator Martín Lousteau. Senior figures within the umbrella trade union movement Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT) and both factions of the Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (CTA), the public sector employees’ union Asociación Trabajadores del Estado (ATE), and social movements were all present, piggybacking on the protests and in so doing presenting the Milei administration with an opportunity to depict them as eminently political.

But there was no disguising the size of the protest march, which took up the whole of the Avenida de Mayo, and adjoining streets, from congress to the Plaza de Mayo. Students and parents with children on their shoulders were most prevalent, sending a message to Milei that free public higher education is deemed sacrosanct in Argentina, providing hope to families of a ticket out of poverty to a better life.

The concern for Milei, which was implicit in his fierce denial that his government is denying funding to public universities, is that the march was not purely about education but also a manifestation of incipient public disillusionment with his government; that this first significant public backlash will not be the last.

Milei hails major progress

It was noteworthy that the day before the protests, Milei took to national television during prime time to deliver the news that Argentina had posted a fiscal surplus. In a piece of political theatre, Milei said that his government had achieved “a feat of global historic proportions” by posting a fiscal surplus in the first quarter of 2024 of Ar$3.8tn (US$4.34bn), the equivalent of 0.6% of GDP, and a financial surplus, after the payment of debt interest, of Ar$1.13tn, or 0.2% of GDP, for the first time since 2008. Flanked by his entire economic team, Milei said that “despite the opposition of a good part of the political and economic establishment in Argentina, who systematically questioned our ideas…our plan is working”.

It is of crucial political importance to Milei to flag up positive economic figures to try and reassure a public reeling from cuts to public subsidies and stratospheric inflation that his government’s ‘chainsaw’ policy is working and to bear with him. There was no increase in revenue in real terms, however; the surplus was obtained through these swingeing cuts to public spending, lower pension payments, and public sector layoffs.

Milei did not appear in a national broadcast to present the latest economic growth figures, which were released by the national statistics institute (Indec) on 23 April with no government fanfare. They showed that economic activity contracted by 3.6% in the first two months of the year due to plunging consumer demand for goods and services as a result of shrinking household incomes amid the fiscal adjustment, austerity measures, and soaring inflation.

Construction in February was down by 19.1% year-on-year, financial services by 12.1%, manufacturing by 8.4%, and retail by 5.5%. Agriculture recorded 5.5% growth (albeit against a very low base of comparison due to the severe drought a year earlier), while mining activity (11.7%) and fishing (31.6%) also expanded.

Addressing the exclusive Llao Llao Forum, attended by some 120 top business leaders, in the resort city of Bariloche, in the southern province of Río Negro, on 19 April, Milei said that the government had encountered some “transitional problems”, but he argued that these were to be expected when moving from “a hyper-socialist economy to a market economy”.


CGT general strike

The big question is how long Argentines are prepared to endure these “transitional problems”. The CGT has announced a second general strike for 9 May, after its habitual mobilisation on International Labour Day on 1 May. The Milei administration had hoped to head off a strike after holding talks with the CGT leadership in the Casa Rosada presidential palace on 10 April, but just as its ‘accord’ with public universities did not stop the vast protests on 23 April, so too the talks with the CGT failed to convince.

Jorge Sola, the secretary general of the Sindicato del Seguro insurance union and press secretary of the CGT, said the government had made an “important step” by opening negotiations but “concrete actions” were required. The Gordos, the largest trade unions, were prepared to hold off on a strike for now, while making a big show of force on 1 May, but teachers’ unions in particular were adamant that strike action should go ahead.


Impeachment

A group of left-wing intellectuals and human rights activists aligned with Kirchnerismo, including former Nobel peace prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Taty Almeida, of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, presented a document to the federal lower chamber of congress on 22 April calling for President Milei’s impeachment for “poor performance of his duties and possible commission of crimes”, while denouncing “economic genocide”. They both took part in the protest match on 23 April. “The president said that it is a political march; of course it is political, but it is not partisan,” Almeida said.


Legal boost

President Milei received a fillip on 16 April when the supreme court (CSJN) unanimously rejected two legal challenges to the decree of necessity and urgency (DNU) he issued in December last year. The legal appeals against the DNU were brought by the governor of La Rioja, Ricardo Quintela, and a lawyer, Jorge Rizzo. The CSJN did not state whether the DNU was constitutional but threw the appeals out on technical grounds. It said that the constitution did not allow the CSJN to interpret the constitutionality of laws “in the abstract”, adding that appeals must provide “a concrete…specific case”.


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