Week 10: Power to the People

I found this weeks topic quite interesting because of what I saw and learned during my exchange in Argentina. I arrived to Argentina in 2015, right under the elections. People were extremely unsatisfied with their peronist president Cristina Kirchner, who they claimed to steal money from the state and keep the poor poor by providing them with extensive social welfare. The Argentines elected the rightist Mauricio Macri as their new president, hoping for a jobs and a stronger economy. To be fair, at this time, my level of Spanish was really poor and my understanding as to what was going on and why was really non-existent. However, in 2016, at the end of my year there, I lived with a family who really struggled to get by because they were unable to find a job of any kind. Macri had been in power for some time now, and people were already longing for Cristina and Peronism. Furthermore, the Argentine peso had been going downhill rapidly, making everything constantly more expensive. "At least we had jobs and food then", they used to say. I knew that populism played a big role in the Argentine politics, and everything seemed to be explained in really simple terms. For example, very often I would hear them saying "No tenés que darles peces a los pobres, enseñalos a pescar" - referring to the social welfare that the government was providing the disadvantaged, which they thought was keeping the poor "lazy", unwilling to work. Nonetheless, as I was able to experience myself, the problem wasn't that they didn't want to work because the little money that the government gave them kept them satisfied, it was rather that there was no work to be found. 

I have always thought about populism in terms of overly simplifying problems and solutions to those problems, in order to appeal to the people. However, I hadn't thought that populism could be used as a tool to construct the people to which it is aimed at. As discussed in the lecture, Evita served like a bridge between the elites and the people. I think that the allegory of a "bridge" is what enables the populism. Evita appeared as someone who cared and fought for the rights of "the people", she praised the workers and their efforts and spoke in a way that was appealing to the normal folks. Hence, she was able to blur the distinction between the ruling elite and "the people" and provide them with a sense of power.

Hence, it is not surprising that Peronism has maintained its appeal in the country, and in the past elections the new president Alberto Fernandez brought the ideology back in the picture. Therefore, I wonder if the ideology will ever actually gain back its power the way it once had? 


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