Buenos Aires Herald

November 13, 2012

Now that everybody has had a few days to absorb (or not absorb, as the case may be) the impact of last Thursday’s massive pot-banging protest, the question inevitably arises — Where do we go from here? Paradoxically enough, this question becomes harder to answer if we question the widely accepted assumption that “8-N” was purely an opposition outcry. Proceeding from that assumption, various government supporters have sought to discredit the march as both aimless and leaderless due to the multiplicity of grievances and the lack of any clear identification with any specific opposition grouping. Neither argument is convincing — the multiplicity of grievances (crime, inflation, corruption, infrastructure, etc.) reflects the complexity of life in Argentina today much better than the single-issue politics of a personal agenda apparently preferred by the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner administration while the opposition will be under no obligation to produce a leader for next October’s midterm elections which will not be required to produce a new government (the 2015 presidential elections will be another matter, of course).

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