It is difficult to avoid the qualification “treason” when referring to Alberto Fernández. However, there seems to be no other qualifier more in keeping with reality. The president has betrayed the Argentine people. A people battered by four traumatic years of shameless neoliberalism, a global pandemic, more than 100,000 dead, chronic inflation that has been running at over 50% a year for four years now, increasing poverty that has turned food into a luxury good, and to this must be added the disappointment and frustration of the population in the face of a government that claimed to be national and popular, arrived by means of an electoral front made up of explicit enemies until very recently. However, there seems to be no other qualifier more in keeping with reality. The president has betrayed the Argentine people. A people battered by four traumatic years of shameless neoliberalism, a global pandemic, more than 100,000 dead, chronic inflation that has been running at over 50% a year for four years now, increasing poverty that has turned food into a luxury good, and to this must be added the disappointment and frustration of the population in the face of a government that claimed to be national and popular, arrived by means of an electoral front made up of explicit enemies until very recently, united exclusively in the face of the horror of having Macri and his acolytes in the House of government, indebting the country to facilitate systematic dispossession through capital flight, and the persecution of political and social opponents, by means of a criminal organisation within the State, which in every way is comparable to the actions of the ominous genocidal military dictatorship.

Accomplice to this (perhaps involuntary) betrayal is the vice-president Cristina Fernández, who handpicked an obscure figure in national politics, a figure known for his proximity to the corporate and monopolistic sectors that daily attack the Argentine people and, at the time, an acid and (again) treacherous critic of the wife of whom he says was “a friend”: Néstor Kirchner.

A people battered by four traumatic years of shameless neoliberalism, a global pandemic, more than 100,000 dead, chronic inflation that has been running at over 50% a year for four years now, increasing poverty that has turned food into a luxury good, and to this must be added the disappointment and frustration of the population in the face of a government that claimed to be national and popular, arrived by means of an electoral front made up of explicit enemies until very recently, united exclusively in the face of the horror of having Macri and his acolytes in the House of government, indebting the country to facilitate systematic dispossession through capital flight, and the persecution of political and social opponents, by means of a criminal organisation within the State, which in every way is comparable to the actions of the ominous genocidal military dictatorship.

Accomplice to this (perhaps involuntary) betrayal is the vice-president Cristina Fernández, who handpicked an obscure figure in national politics, a figure known for his proximity to the corporate and monopolistic sectors that daily attack the Argentine people and, at the time, an acid and (again) treacherous critic of the wife of whom he says was “a friend”: Néstor Kirchner [2].

Now, in many ways, the adjective is superfluous and irrelevant. Because what is really important at the end of the day is that Kirchnerism, and the Peronism in which Kirchnerism once found a place, is now at its limit. What the country needs is not to save Peronism from its debacle, but to save the country, and for that it is time for the political forces within the current coalition or electoral front that oppose the dishonourable surrender to which Alberto Fernández led us under the hand of Minister Guzmán to imagine a new framework of struggle. That framework of struggle can no longer be built with Peronist, radical or “independent” “social democracy”. What we need is a radicalisation of the political spectrum towards the left, which pushes the centre decisively towards the opposite pole to the one to which it has been driven by the extreme right, wrongly called “libertarian”, in which the hawks (and also the doves) of JxC and the radical party find themselves comfortably.

What we called Kirchnerism for many years now needs the left, and the left needs Kirchnerism to form a new alliance to confront the danger that today stalks us as no other danger has ever stalked the country throughout its history: hunger.

Alberto Fernández has decided to prioritise the international creditors over the Argentine people, postponing for an uncertain future not the population’s welfare, but its own survival, and the concentrated powers are responding to the generous unconditional surrender of the state to the IMF and the debtors and fugitives associated with the illicit debt, with the arrogance that the powerful show before cowards: kicking them to the ground.

Cristina Fernandez is responsible for her choice of Alberto Fernandez. The Argentine people, the Peronist people, the Kirchnerist people, must honour Cristina for the meritorious efforts she has made for the homeland during all these years, but it is time to turn the page. Kirchnerism has reached its limit. The people are asking us to imagine another possible Argentina. The people are already lost, so they have nothing left to lose.