That Pilo Bordón who from Mendoza asked to destatize life

When in the early ’90s Carlos Menem installed in Argentina, in a guaranga and chambona way, his vision of liberalismwith the known profusion of corruption, In Mendoza, the then Peronist governor José Octavio Bordón also tried to understand the new air of freedom that had brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The president of Mendoza did so, however, with an interesting warning. It was necessary, he stated, “to begin by destatizing life,” that is to say, remove the excess of statism that Argentine political culture had. That would help the state and the market They will begin to act more creatively and productively.

Bordón foresaw what would later affect Peronism. As well as Menem’s dirty liberalism rotted in his own story (convertibility), with which he ended up leaving a time bomb for his successor, the unstable Fernando de la Rúa, thus lThe three governments of Cristina Kirchner (the last one, co-authored with Alberto Fernández) have left the country, in the name of a supposed leftist ideology, mired in a coven of poverty and discredit.

The real engine

Today the question is whether We are witnessing in Argentina the return of liberal ideas or an extremist way of understanding them. There are those who affirm that the important thing at this stage is that Javier Milei lays the foundations for a new stage of liberalism, so that later it is society itself that demands to get rid of any anarcho or ultra idea, that is, from the extreme right, to return to the political center.

We are talking about a center space that should have the ductility to accept center-left or center-right visionsaccording to the convenience of the country and not of factional and extremist ideologies.

It is clear that The President spits on those types of ideas. It gives him fever that this possibility is suggested because For him, the political center is a dunghill populated by lukewarm and creepy people.. Milei considers himself “a mole infiltrated into statist lines”, someone who has come to dynamite that vision of the world. Your task, like a Chacarita Terminatoris to eliminate the rats that make up the political caste.

The channeler

There is no doubt that Milei knew promote and channel the social bad mood of a majority of the population who got fed up with populism and “present state”, the one that never managed to stop the inflationary wind that ate up salaries month after month. It turns out that said “protective father” was the one that generated the rise in prices. But, be careful, the phenomenon Milei got on a road whose engine had already been started by society itself.

There are still people who wonder why voters did not choose the presidential ticket of Together for Change (Patricia Bullrich-Luis Petri) since that macrista and that radical said proclaim a more classical liberalisma republicanism with which many countries around the world were able to provide the majority of their inhabitants a better life.

The answer is simple: Together for Change did not generate trust. What’s more, many feared they were facing a moth-eaten version of the “second period” that Macri spoke of in his political memoirs.

In those nations that remain republican and democratic, powerful ideas still resonate, like that of German Chancellor Willy Brandt, when he stated. “We must have as much market as possible and as much State as necessary.” For Mileii, however, a social democrat is something as or more “remarkable” than a communist.

In the 20th century, social liberalism with Keynesian overtones, that is, the one that the Europeans of the postwar period they called social democracyproduced one of the great economic moments of the century (and history). We are referring to what was called the Welfare State, which still continues, updatedin the Nordic countries that knew how to adapt it to new realities, avoiding crystallization.

From both sides

We begin and end with an idea from Bordón. During his administration in Mendoza, the fall of the Berlin Wall occurred, the end of the Cold War between liberal and capitalist countries and nations with communist administrations. Bordón then explained that he had to be careful because “The Berlin Wall fell on both sides.”

And he explained it like this. “The triumph of the flexible and dynamic democratic societies of the West over the rigid and dictatorial regime of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not a product of savage capitalism and restricted democracies, but precisely of the emergence of more inclusive liberal political systems and articulated market economies with new social rights, institutions and anti-monopoly mechanisms”.