Parliamentary democracy is far from being a synonym for productivity

The World Cup makes for something of a black hole for the rest of the news, which there is absolutely no need to fill now in this time of national exaltation between Wednesday’s comeback (again) semi-final triumph and tomorrow’s final but the clock will continue ticking afterwards, even for those who believe that football is not a matter of life or death but much more important than that. A vacuum will then need to be filled and while awaiting new issues to rise to the fore in the aftermath, this editorial will focus on the lack of alternatives to a government ruling almost by default.

This lack of alternatives should not be mistaken for a lack of criticism. It is easy enough to criticise a government ruling by decree, ignoring Congress legislation, in continual contempt of court and generally riding a coach and horses through the separation of powers and there is no lack of criticism along these and other lines, despite President Javier Milei’s professed contempt for journalists and press conferences – a free press survives in this country even if Milei this week joined his idol Donald Trump in shunning the 51-nation Media Freedom Coalition’s latest statement on freedom of the press. But the criticisms need to be supplemented by placing a much greater onus on the other two powers of government and the political opposition to come up with constructive alternatives.

One pet line of government defence when confronted with corruption scandals (most recently seen in the attempts to salvage former Cabinet Chief Manuel Adorni) has been to assert that such cases belong in court and yet we rarely see the courts picking up the baton – their guiding spirit is deference to a democratically elected government and indeed the converse is hardly welcome when one minor judge feels entitled to quash an entire labour reform approved by Congress or laws are declared unconstitutional just because that is the opinion of the deciding magistrate. Yet there is a fine line between self-restraint and downright negligence and that line is crossed when judicial activism is sacrificed to deference and justice also turns a blind eye to some of the government’s more cavalier bids to bypass the institutions.

So much for the judicial branch – the legislative branch is passive to the point of being indolent. The first half of this year finished with eight Senate sessions and 12 in the lower house of Congress – i.e. little more than monthly in the upper house with the deputies in action once a fortnight. This is slightly unfair on the more active members of Congress committees but the point remains that parliamentary democracy is far from being a synonym for productivity, with overpaid parliamentarians generally held in contempt by public opinion.

Congress should also be providing more of a base for the political opposition although that onus should be shared by the provincial governments – since the return of democracy in 1983, every single change of government was headed by a provincial governor (always assuming that then City Mayor Mauricio Macri possessed equivalent status in 2015) until Alberto Fernández in 2019 and then Milei. But apart from Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof, the clear frontrunner for the Peronist presidential nomination, no provincial governor seems to be looming even as a dark horse – between being in hock to the central government for federal revenue-sharing funds and looking kindly on an export-led growth model favouring the hinterland at the expense of Greater Buenos Aires, only a handful of governors other than Kicillof show any anxiety to see Milei replaced.

Returning to Congress, the deputies and senators of the moderate opposition seem excessively dependent on the survival of the PASO primaries, a Kirchnerite invention viewed by many citizens as a needless expense and duplication of effort, instead of looking for other mechanisms for sorting out their differences – a Plan B is needed in case the elimination of PASO avidly sought by a government thriving on opposition division should be achieved. A losing battle against fragmentation is not helped by the virtual disappearance of party labels in favour of the plethora of “isms” prefixed by the surname of some politician on an ego trip.

Yet all that lies after the challenge of tomorrow’s World Cup final between an Argentina which has not dropped a point and a Spain which has barely conceded a goal – all minds are quite legitimately centred on that with no reason to think beyond. But if tomorrow is another day, so is the one after.

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