During a press conference held yesterday during the IMF’s annual Spring Meeting in Washington, Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva scandalously proposed that in next October’s legislative elections, Argentines should vote for the party of President Javier Milei, the Freedom Advances party (LLA). “The country is going to elections in October,” Georgieva said. “It’s very important that they [Argentines] don’t derail the will to change. Right now I don’t see that risk materializing, but I would urge Argentina: stay on the course,” LatinFinance quoted her as saying.
This shocking interference into Argentina’s internal affairs provoked such outrage inside the country that Georgieva had to very quickly “clarify” her comments, which did nothing to change her message. She explained to reporters “look, elections are for the Argentine people, not for us. What we have learned from experience is that very often, before elections, governments weaken their resolve to reform, so my message was to the government, stay the course for the benefit of growth in Argentina and for the benefit of the Argentine people.”
For the Peronist, and other political opposition, Georgieva’s outrageous remarks confirmed that the $20 billion IMF Extended Fund Facility just granted Milei was an “electoral, political loan,” just like the gigantic $57 billion granted in 2018 to then-President Mauricio Macri by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde for the sole purpose of ensuring Macri’s victory in the 2019 presidential elections. Rabid neoliberal Macri was defeated, but the country was saddled with an unpayable debt. But beyond this, the head of the IMF telling people how to vote, and what policies they should support, brought up the historical “Braden or Peron” polemic, the slogan that captured the outrageous interference in the 1946 presidential election by British agent and U.S. ambassador Spruille Braden, who tried to ensure Juan Peron’s defeat. The mobilization around this slogan by Peron’s supporters posed the battle as one between U.S. imperialism and a nationalist leader. Peron won.
Given the debacle of the 2018 loan, Georgieva insists that “this time,” things will be different. (Most of that loan left the country as capital flight.) “This time there is a determination to clean up the economy,” she said. Moreover, “Argentina is not alone. We are here. The World Bank is here. The Inter-American Development Bank is here,” and is really stepping up. While speaking, Georgieva was sporting a chainsaw pin on her lapel, the symbol of Milei’s killer policies.
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, national president of the Peronist or Justicialista party, responded to Georgieva with a communique charging that “these statements confirm what we’ve said from the very beginning: this is another political loan, similar to that awarded to Mauricio Macri in 2018. It has cost us too much to win the right to vote just to leave that decision to a foreign organization which has nothing to say about the will of the Argentine people,” Página 12 [reported.
Axel Kiciloff, Peronist governor of the province of Buenos Aires, said Georgieva’s scandalous statements are a grave interference in Argentina’s democratic life, and that the Fund never even apologized for making the illegal loan to Macri in 2018, to “finance the reelection of a failing President. Now it’s again coming to the rescue of a new experiment in cruelty and submission.” He recommended that the historic slogan of “Braden or Peron,” be updated to “the IMF or the Fatherland.”
