Argentine President Alberto Fernandez, in his last general policy speech, launched a virulent attack on Wednesday against justice which does not have “the required independence” and, seven months before general elections, proposed as a project to the country “the utopia of equality”
“40 years ago, our utopia was democracy,” Fernandez said at the opening of the parliamentary session, referring to 40 uninterrupted years of democracy (elections of October 1983) unprecedented in the country’s history. “I propose to you that our utopia today is equality,” he added.
“We built democracy, we live in freedom, achieve equality!” launched the Peronist (center-left) president nine months from the end of his mandate, which will follow the general elections in October-November.
He defended his three years of presidency in a hostile context marked by the Covid, the impact of the war in Ukraine, the Argentinian debt, against a background of chronic inflation (94.5% in 2022), “structural problem which dates back decades. Even if Argentina “has been one of the countries with the most growth for two years” (10.3% in 2021, 5.4% in 2022).
However, the 63-year-old president has not made any explicit allusion to a candidacy, something he has not ruled out on several occasions in recent months, when the October elections promise to be particularly uncertain, to four months of primaries both in the government camp and in the right-wing and center-right opposition.
But Mr. Fernandez has also delivered, at times under boos from the opposition, a full-scale attack on the Argentine judicial system, which he will have tried in vain to reform. The Chamber of Deputies, where the ruling coalition does not have a majority, has never examined the project.
“The judiciary no longer has the public’s trust, it does not function effectively and does not demonstrate the required independence from the de facto (economic) and political powers”, he said. he accuses.
He particularly criticized the “absurd” condemnation in December for fraud of Vice-President Cristina Kirchner, “which was aimed at her political disqualification”. And denounced a judgment of the Supreme Court on the distribution of tax revenues between Buenos Aires (managed by the right) and the provinces.
In January, Mr. Fernandez also launched a parliamentary procedure aimed at dismissing the Supreme Court for “poor exercise of its functions”, a strong symbolic step, but which has practically no chance of succeeding. Both government and opposition in Argentina regularly accuse each other of instrumentalizing or influencing justice.
03/01/2023 20:11:56 – Buenos Aires (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
