Kirchnerism in Argentina: A Populist Dispute for Hegemony

ABSTRACT

The beginning of the twenty-first century brought a new stage in Latin America. After the social movements challenged the neoliberal order, a new kind of government appeared, with leaders who retrieved the demands of the popular classes and even their discourse. The topic of this paper is the Argentine political process resulting in the emergence of Kirchnerism, explaining the political order that arose with the Kirchner and Fernández de Kirchner administrations (2003–15). For a better understanding of contemporary political processes, we should try to retrieve the combined effects of structural (not just economic) relationships and the contingency (not only political) of social disputes. The paper argues that the industrial fraction of the power-bloc was able to lead a hegemonic political order through a populist rupture.

KEYWORDS:

• Kirchnerism
• Argentina
• hegemony
• populism
• power-bloc

Notes on contributor

Francisco J. Cantamutto is an independent political economist working at the Latin American Social Science Faculty (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, FLACSO) in Mexico. He specializes in the contemporary Argentinian political process and the political economy of its developmental model. He has won several scholarships to complete his studies in Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Spain. His latest book is Economía política de la Convertibilidad (The political economy of convertibility), written with Andrés Wainer (2013). He published three chapters in collective books during 2015: “Modes of Development and Realization of Human Rights in Latin America” with Agostina Costantino, “Changes in the Political Configuration of the State in Argentina: From the Convertibility to Néstor Kirchner” with Adrián Velázquez, and “Populist Governments and Unsettled Claims: The Cases of Argentina and Venezuela” with Héctor Hurtado. He has also authored papers in several other peer reviewed journals, the latest of which are “Hegemony Construction and the State: Some Theoretical Foundations” and “The Populism that Was Not: The Duhalde and Rodríguez Saá Governments.” He is a member of the editorial board of Cuadernos de Economía Crítica, the academic journal of the Association of Critical Economy of Argentina and Uruguay.

Notes

¹ For complete discussion of Kirchnerism in this perspective, see Biglieri (2007), Muñoz (2010) and Schuttenberg (2011). The theoretical framework is explained in detail in Laclau (2005).

² For complete discussion of Kirchnerism in this perspective, see Basualdo (2006), Féliz and López (2012) and Piva (2007).

³ There are many difficult theoretical and methodological discussions related to this position. We don’t pretend to solve them here, but just clarify our perspective. For further references, see Isaac (1987), Osorio (2001) and Pereyra (1988).

⁴ MTA and CTA are related to workers unions, the first as a group of unions, the second as a kind of federation. FRENAPO was an initiative of social movements and organizations aware of poverty related issues. The Piqueteros was a social movement that arose from the unemployed workers who organized themselves to resist in the urban territories.

⁵ Laclau's proposal of a tendentially empty signifier is necessary for the very confluence of diverse demands on a single discourse: the meaning of the confluence signifier has to somehow “loosen” precision to accept more diverse interpretations. It is almost a rule that leaders themselves can achieve this function, thereby containing the diverse demands around them. The fact that the populist movement tends to adopt the leader's name is a sign of this symbolic procedure: that is why we talk about “Kirchnerism.” This symbolic function is called a “tendentially empty leader/signifier.”

⁶ The identification worked retroactively because none of the agents had previous links to the president-to-be Kirchner. Once in office, his discourse made sense for many political and social agents, which afterwards read their own experience as part of what the president explained about the national political process.