There comes a time in Argentina’s political story line when nothing a ruler can do is worth a thing. True to form, there have been times when rulers did very little to no good, or even the very contrary (check 1976-83, for instance, in your history books). But in other times it seems political dialogue comes with a loudspeaker at one end and a deaf ear at the other. Words come and go but very few things are said. And very few are listened to. Even fewer make any sense.

The story line for President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has reached that point in which the main character is hapless and hopeless, at least if her goal is to recover the ocean of public credibility she seems to have lost since she became Argentina’s first female president in December 2007. The public that voted for her now seems to have given her the thumbs down for good. Her character profile is going down and, as it is the norm in new Argentine film tradition as in new and old Argentine politics, happy endings are the exception rather than the rule.

President Cristina referred to her public persona on 1st March, as she delivered her annual State of the Nation address. The President started off by saying she would speak about the “real” Argentina. She said this Argentina is at odds with the “virtual or mediatised” Argentina where “terrible things happen, where everything is wrong”. By default, the president placed herself outside the story line the mainstream media is putting out every day, virtually placing herself out of present day history.

President Cristina is an intransigent politician. She was when she served as senator and deputy in representation of her husband Néstor Kirchner’s Patagonian home-province, Santa Cruz, and she continues to be now that she is in the highest office. But her vision that the country’s media establishment is telling a story based on political and money interests rather than any journalistic ideals is too obvious to be denied and too harmful to be left unchecked. Words fly as spears from one camp to the other, and no one seems to be speaking the same language.

The ruling party and the opposition have lost all sign of political etiquette. As she was addressing the opening of this year’s congressional session, the president announced she had signed two executive decrees to actually avoid Congress – a new, unorthodox way to try to save face after the unorthodox summer-long attempt to resort to Central Bank reserves to pay out this year’s debt. In return, the fragmented and squabbling, yet growing, opposition not only fails to find anything worth praising in the administration – like the simple fact that Argentina survived the worst global economic crash in almost a century virtually unscathed – but also declines to discuss the substance of policies and instead targets the Kirchners’ alleged corrupt and bullying ways.

The actors stand on a stage that is ready to shatter. Enjoy the play while you can. There’s even a novelty this time around: politics are going bust while the economy is sound. At least for now. It is still not clear whether the crash will come first in the virtual or the real world. Or, even more likely, in both places at the same time.

All of a sudden, food is on the table. Hold on, isn’t that supposed to be good for a “former third World” and/or “developing” and/or “emerging” country like Argentina? It should be, unless what you are discussing is not how much food you’ll serve your family every evening but how much the dish will cost you tomorrow.

As if the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the first woman to run this country after succeeding her husband Néstor in December 2007, had not had enough in her first two years in office with a string of political misfortunes – starting with a campaign financing scandal on her third day in office, followed by an eroding bout for taxes with the country’s heavyweight farming sector, the worst global economic slump in a century and a midterm electoral defeat – now comes inflation throwing its weight around and feeding the price of food, and, most notably, Argentina’s darling, the beef.

Inflation is not just a key variable of Argentina’s economy, as it would be in any other economy. It is a collective psychological problem. If you were to look into historian parallels, you might want to re-read what the Weimar Republic hyper-inflation chaos meant for the Germans back in the 20s and how it ended politically. Argentina’s latest inflation outburst of 1989-90 – in two separate and short-lived but intense periods – did not end in the election of any Hitler-like figure but a mind-boggling eco-political gem called “convertibility” (the one peso is worth one US dollar formula). It was a collective decision to win monetary stability even at the expense of piling up a heap of debt that would for generations to come condition the country’s ability to live decently.

Worry about the symbols of beef, if you want, but do it at your own peril. The media/public frenzy about the price of tender loin might sparkle a short debate about the crazy fact that each Argentine, on average, chews (a little) and swallows over 70kg of beef per year, well in the lead in the global chart (Footnote: if poverty stands at around 30% and some ten do not have enough to eat everyday, a few Argentines are having much more beef than others).

But the beef situation is just the tip of an iceberg that includes a political psychodrama that, once it gets going, no government or authority can stop. Oh, and don’t even try to seek answers from economists. Inflation faces Argentina with a political version of an unresolved Oedipus conflict better suited for your Freuds and Lacans (there are plenty of those here) than your Adam Smiths and David Ricardos (we have a bunch of those too). The question is whether President Fernández de Kirchner will be inclined to listen to any shrink from the shrink and more importantly whether – as her approval ratings continue to sit comfortably at the lowest levels ever – Argentines will listen to her.

Fasten your seatbelts: Argentina is getting started. If a country reputed worldwide for looking civilized but living in a constant state of political crisis needed something to bring its own flavour to the global economic quagmire, that is an early midterm vote. Especially when the pundits who claim to know tell you that this vote is likely to break rather than make for the incumbent administration of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the first woman ever to be elected to the presidency here. Early the vote will be, much earlier that initially – and lawfully – scheduled: from 25th October the administration has set voting day on 28th June.

From now on until election night, you’ll hear many things. For most of you, dear readers, those of you who are not elligible Argentine citizens and therefore do not have to cast a ballot, most of the talk will be pure babble. But for those of you who actually came here hoping to see some political wrestling turned self-destructive gymnastics, there will be a few words here and there you might want to catch and chew as the election feast rages.

You’ll have to be sharp in your hearing though. The key words might come from people other than the main actors in the political arena. Expect to hear a lot from President Cristina and her predecessor, husband and mentor: former president Néstor Kirchner. The talking will be loud but not clear, as the Kirchner couple engages in many a verbal bout with the members of a scattered but seemingly growing opposition.

This opposition mostly hails from two groupings: the very bowels of the ruling Peronist party and the Peronists’ prime 20th century foes (not counting the military, I mean): the Radical Party (the capital R strips these Radicals of much of the semantic radicalisation inherent to the word).

Some of the names of these opponents might or might not sound familiar to you. Enemies within: Carlos Reutemann, Felipe Solá, Francisco de Narváez. Enemies without: Elisa Carrió, Gerardo Morales, Ricardo Alfonsín (the latter a new star born to the ashes of Argentina’s enduring necrophilia following the 30th March death of his father, former president Raúl Alfonsín). The odd man out but closer to the Peronists: Mauricio Macri, mayor of Buenos Aires City, former Boca Juniors president, rich-man in his free time. Hopefully Clemente – that’s me, sure, but in the land of Maradona the bigshops speak of themselves in the third person – will write about each of them as the election approaches.

Back to the initial point, here’s a few words you should try to spot out, and de-euphemise them (excuse the verb creation):

Crisis. No wonder, Clemente, that word is in the newspapers everyday these days. Right, but wrong. What we are looking for here is the noun preceded by the adjective Institutional. “Institutional crisis” in porteño – or Argentine for that matter – lunfardo means this place becomes hell on earth. The last time that formula was used by the mainstream media, you were counting 30 people dead in political riots – five of them in that very sophisticated area surrounding Plaza de Mayo.

Governability. No matter how horrible this word sounds, you’ll hear it more and more. It is actually the prelude to the said crisis: once you lose governability you are ready to be the leader of an institutional crisis. That means, of course, your head gets chopped Robespierre-style.

Dollar. There’s a Hegelian master-slave dialectic between Argentine politics and the currency market. The Argentine psychosis for the daily price of the greenback might be unique and scores headlines in the newspapers everyday. When Argentines enter green fever mode, governments don’t last much longer. Take a stroll in the hub of the financial district – Sarmiento and San Martín in downtown BA – to take a taste of the dollar hysteria.

This is just a modest start, of course. More words might capture your imagination as you hear them. Beware: what you hear might not be exactly what you are getting. Post-modernity has long won: there is always margin for language creativity.

The word history only gained autonomy from the word story around the year 1500. This petty nuance that arrives late in history and language can help to grasp the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner on its first anniversary. Mrs. Kirchner was making the headlines here and abroad on 10th December last year for going down in history as the first woman ever to be elected president of Argentina. She was taking over from her husband, who was in turn leaving office with the highest approval ratings in memory for an outgoing leader. Inauguration day had male K passing on the sash and baton to female K looking bright in white, almost like Cinderella out in a political fairy tale. Her inauguration speech, articulated out of a few guiding ideas scribbled on a paper, was one of the finest pieces of political oratory since democracy was back among Argentines in 1983.

That story of success is now history. When she walked into the Casa Rosada with over eight million votes in her pocket, the world had heard little about toxic mortgage loans and Argentina was only second to China in the list of world growth. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner won a campaign that never was. She cruised to victory as if the Kirchners were the only political force in a land where politicians mushroom like footballs. The campaign was so easy a ride that she hardly had to make any promises. She vaguely spoke of the need for a social pact on the eve of Argentina’s 200^th anniversary in 2010. The way she talked and the way she dressed make many take for a fact that she would be more cosmopolitan and foreign policy oriented than her one-horse town Patagonian husband. One of the words she most used during the campaign was ‘institutionality’.

The punch line of her campaign was a three-minute TV ad that told the story of a five-year-old girl called Dolores Argentina (dolores meaning ‘pain’). Little pain had been born “the day we all wanted to die”, 20th December 2001, at the heart of a crisis that dragged this country to the verge of disintegration. The ad argued that through the years, the little girl had started to live a more normal life, she was eating, she was going to school. As the country was becoming normal again, the voice over said, people were starting to call this child Argentina rather than Dolores.

The brains behind the tale of Dolores ‘Pain’ Argentina must now be proud at having produced a prophetic irony of Shakespearean proportions.

An obvious conclusion into her presidency is that Dolores is far from having vanished as Argentina’s first name: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s presidency has been an ordeal. If one is to believe in opinion polls, the Argentine president is down to the lowest popularity rating in the continent, having sunk to 20 percent terrain to even beat the much loathed outgoing George W. Bush. Anything that is obvious, however, is not so easy to explain.

Like the US president, Cristina lost all of her credibility here and abroad following an unfortunate chain of events: from a corruption scandal of international proportions involving cash-stuffed suitcases landing on government-hired planes, Miami-based spies and FBI investigators; an uprising of Argentina’s heavyweight farming sector unheard of in the history of the rich pampas; or accelerating inflation massaged in public by fabricated official statistics. All of these incidents and others violently eroded the only one thing political leaders have in their favour in a world in which nation states are more and more losing power to powerful global forces: credibility.

Argentines are moody and stubborn. When something gets into their heads it is impossible to make them change their mind. A notion became fact from the start: the president is a puppet of her husband. The president is there just for the protocol. Husband runs the show. How much of the good of macho thing – both in men and women – motivates this certainty that ultimately destroys the Cristina government credibility will be up to historians and sociologists to judge.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner turns one year old in office on the same day Argentina’s democracy turns 25. The deterioration of a government is a common thing in democracy. But when A goes, in comes B. If something should worry Argentines is the lack of options. There is no Obama to the Argentine Bush. There is no McCain either. When the political system as a whole falls on the wrong side of the public, what remains is institutional collapse. In 25 years, two elected presidents completed their term, another two did not. The president surely does not want to go down in history as the female leader who could not manage the reins of Argentina. Her story so far is proving dramatically difficult.

In times of globalisation, the great thinkers of our time say, the lives of us mortals on Earth are more intertwined and interdependent than they have ever been before. So technically, somebody’s bad news should never be somebody else’s good news. There is always an exception to any rule, though. But the question is, why does the exception always have to be Argentina?

The finances of the world – as you, maybe worried about the value of the greenbacks that give you a fairly decent life in the pampas may have heard – have gone down the road of disaster. Most world leaders were seen grim-faced at the sight of their local stocks sinking to the tune of the Wall Street woes. But one seemed joyful, even exultant at times: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Since President Husband Néstor took office in 2003, the Kirchners have earned a reputation as the financial rogues of the Western world. The truth is that Kirchner the President Husband did not himself declare the largest sovereign debt default in history, a feat performed by a gentlemen who just lasted seven days in office in the hectic days of Argentina’s last super crisis 2001-2.

But the President Husband did order a bad debt swap that included an unprecedented and somehow humiliating 75% haircut for the bondholders. And, to make matters worse, he paid off the country’s whole debt with the IMF in late 2005 so that he did not have to hear the bureaucrats in Washington telling him what to do with the country’s economy.

Now that the US government has decided to go socialist and the financial world as we knew it is to no longer exist, the Kirchners have switched to ‘I told you’ mode. President Wife Cristina took every single opportunity she was given on national TV to remind the public how right she was about the need for state intervention in the economy and how wrong and hypocritical were those guys – popularly known as ‘the markets’ – who make a luxurious living out of scribbling prescriptions in the form of economic reports about the countries of the Third World.

Oh! This is the Third World. The First World is somewhere else. Listen to the President Wife:

“The First World, which we were repeatedly told was Mecca, is collapsing like a bubble,” she says. Not without a touch of power poetry, she adds: Argentina remains firm ‘in the midst of the swelling sea’. Her punch line is: “It’s time for many of those institutions to look around and do something for themselves instead of telling us what to do all the time.”  

The subtext of President Wife – leave us alone, we know better than you about what’s best for us – might be right. Like President Lame Duck in the north, who is sticking the state nose in the sacred coffers of free markets at a time those coffers are empty, the Presidents Husband and Wife have also done a thing or two to anger the Gods of Demand and Supply.

A dragging public scandal over whether the officials inflation statistics are true to reality is just the latest paradigmatic example of a series of government intervention in the economy that ranged from the nationalisation of privatised companies to the incorporation of government-friendly business groups in backbone sectors of the economy, mostly in the energy department.

If more state intervention is the way the world is heading, the Kirchners’ heterodox economic views might as well go down in history as a certain avant-garde deed. But it probably won’t. In the meantime, the Presidential Couple should bear in mind only one political powerhouse in this globe prints the paper markets bow to. And the money-maker does not dwell in house painted in pink.

So you wanted some entertainment and you got it. At least for a hundred days Argentina was that cool wild place you would watch on CNN every once in a while falling apart. It was about time to kick the good times goodbye and have them cede way to some real Peronista-style politics and some fellow-countrymen backstabbing.

It is also true that one hundred days is just a tiny bit too long for one single topic, isn’t it?

Blame it on the passion. The passion you cherish in tango or football is the same emotional distortion that could suddenly turn porteños – and every single Argentine for that matter – into experts on soybean, wheat, corn, milk and the fundamental dynamics of the world’s commodity markets.

True, it is better to talk rubbish about soccer than about world economics, isn’t it? Thank goodness the Olympic Games are here.

Argentina has entered the calm that succeeds the storm. The storm that came from the world famous pampas in the form of soy-rich farmers on tax rebellion mode has seemingly passed, and you won’t hear pot-banging in the city or tractors wielding Argentine flags on the roads for a while. But as the dust settles down, it is still hard to assess how much damage it was really caused to the mother ship of Argentina’s latest political trick: Kirchnerism.

If it was weird enough for a husband to pass on the presidential honours to his wife – both elected – in a manifestation of political love reportedly unheard of the history of the whole world, nobody expected Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the first female to be ever elected as head of the state here, to descend to the league of beleaguered politicians in so short a time. Don’t look for any simplistic explanations: there are none. And there will be none for quite some time. Any Argentine – young, old or in the middle – would still be unable to give you a sound or convincing explanation about what a political experiment called Peronism was all about over six decades ago.

Is it Cristina Fernández’s fault if Argentines in the ranks of the middle class do no like the way she talks? Is that really important? One thing for certain: this lady (former first) has been in the public limelight for years and the way she talks has not changed a thing in the process. Is the president to blame for the chauvinism of Argentine women, who in their vast majority (at least among the urban, semi-elite crowd you and I mingle with) tell you they have a gut thing against the president?

Argentines have wasted lots of time many times in the past caring about form rather than substance. A man called Jorge Videla was described by the press of the time (yes, the same papers you might read these days, Clarín, La Nación and those guys… no, The Argentimes was not around yet) as a good mannered and well-educated gentleman. While he threw a World Cup football party, thousands disappeared, never to be seen again. In the 1990s, a man that international news agencies described as ‘flamboyant’ played sport or did the belly dance on TV while the country was being auctioned for peanuts and sovereign debt swelling three-fold.

Beware when you hear your average Argentine calling a president voted in just nine months ago ‘arrogant’, ‘frivolous’ or simply ‘a bitch’. Something may be cooking. And the calm that succeeded the storm might precede a debacle.

Argentina is argentinising rapidly. This is surely what you came here to see, and maybe the reason why we Argentines love it and hate it here, all at the same time.

‘Argentinisation’ is a term that has acquired a life of its own in political thought throughout the 21st century. And one you can apply not only to the collective destinies of a nation, but to anybody’s personal life: you argentinise when all conditions are set for you to succeed and, still, you fail systematically.

Local history teaches children at school that Argentina was a world power at the turn of the 20th century, only comparable to emerging countries such as Australia or Canada. Argentines boast a reputation of being, since them, the granary of the world.

And then it argentinised: its elite lost the way, its leadership went corrupt and seemingly incompetent. Democracy was an exception rather than a rule. The 20th was a lost century. Argentina came in very handy for leaders up in Canada and downunder Australia: it provided the perfect case study of what should not be done if you did not want to go downhill into hell.

So no wonder many of you politically savvy foreign people who flew down here in search of some excitement would be next to despairingly disappointed at the sight of a place that seemed pretty regular in the last few years – Chinese speed growth, fiscal and trade surplus, evil IMF paid goodbye, somebody politically unchallenged in charge.

Former president Néstor Kirchner’s campaign slogan in 2003 was as dull as it could get: he promised nothing but ‘a normal country’.

Argentina resembles the best of the world’s possible while it lasts. And it generally tends to last for as long as Argentines refrain themselves from showing their argentinised streak.

For three months now, the country have seen two small groups locking their horns over a handful of tax money. What started as an economic tug-of-war soon became an irrational love affair row on the deck of a political Titanic. The government wants to see Argentina’s farming sector, the engine of Argentina’s economy, ‘down on its knees’ for daring to speak out against an export tax policy hike. The farmers, in turn, expanded their demands from taxes to ‘a change of the economic model’ that was just re-elected by Argentines a few months ago.

Stuck in the middle, ordinary Argentines watch partly awestruck, partly resigned, to rapidly approaching disaster. The Argentine clash for the benefits of expensive food also makes a great story for the international media.

‘Argentinisation’ is about stabbing each other in the back as soon as there’s a chance. You argentinise by murdering each other on the road. You argentinise when evading taxes becomes the norm, or when you smuggle you savings out of the country (Argentines hold as much undeclared cash abroad as the whole of the country’s sovereign debt). You argentinise when you boast to be earmarked for success and do everything within your reach to fail, time and again. You ultimately argentinise when you realise the melody of tango is nice but living up to the melodramatic lyrics may be painful and hard.

Care for a dance tonight?

Is it the end? Worry not, we have been here before. In fact, if you sense dèjá vu, it is because it is now the zillionth time around! Unless something very unusual happens, Argentina is again on its way to opening the Pandora’s box of political disaster.

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina for the average Argentine, seems doomed to failure. And failure in Argentina is not available in any small dose. Failure comes every once in a while and means death by OD. For those from my generation, the movie ends with no new plot.

If you had come to these pampas in search for political excitement and had until not been let down by the quiet, pocket-filled years of the husband president Néstor Kirchner, your time has now come. Argentina has taken the speedway that goes from silence to self-destruction… mostly overnight.

The Cristina administration’s clash with the farmers – from now on ‘the rich’ – is not just about taxes. It is about who will be to blame for everything that is still wrong and is likely to go wrong in Argentina in the near future. All of a sudden, the public’s abundance-driven silence has become a guttural grunt that, slowly but surely, begins to blame the first-elected female president for every evil tormenting this land. In no less than 100 days, notions have become reality that:

1) Cristina is not in control: there is a dual command in Argentina with husband Kirchner in the starring role.

2) Cristina is frivolous. The president’s stylish wardrobe plus taste for fancy hairdo and expensive accessories do no go down well on certain voting groups – most especially the female masses. ‘That bitch’, you’ll hear in the streets more and more.

3) Cristina is arrogant. Typical case when virtue becomes fault. The president is an impressive public speaker, and does speak some truths. But a lecturing ‘I am always right’ tone is going to come boomeranging back to her sooner rather than later.

So suddenly the rich, who also happen to have the beef Argentines eat and the soy Argentines sell, are angry because they have to pay more taxes, taxes which, by the way, are at the heart of the government’s ‘power-building via cash handouts’ strategy.

The wife president, as the husband president had done for some time, plays Robin Hood and says the rich have to pay so that the poor get food. But the rich take none of that anymore and go macho on the roads, and they withhold the food. Suddenly there are no asados for two consecutive weekends. And Argentines like their asados. And when you expect the hoi polloi to again come to Robin Hood’s rescue, instead – and for reasons unknown – they grab their saucepans and bang them in protest to demand the female president’s head. (Note: banging pots, silly as it may sound, was the symbol of Argentina’s 2001 economic, political and social meltdown.)

Cristina may end up winning one or two of the battles in front of her, even the one against the so-called rich farmers. But she is hardly likely to win the war for her administration unless she gains control of something she is not even close to having so far: the public agenda. Starting from day two since she took office in December, when an international scandal of major proportions involving the US, Venezuela and a suitcase filled with cash blew up in her face, she has been cleaning up somebody else’s messes (most of them her former president husband’s). While it is true Cristina’s government is not seen as anything new but a mere continuation of Néstor – and that may be what Argentines massively voted for after all – she has so far failed to introduce anything close to her own plans for her presidency.

The history of Argentina’s young democracy shows there is no happy ending possible once the popularity threshold has been broken downwards. And then tragedy (at least in the banana republic format) is hardly avoidable. Argentines can only hope history will be wrong for once.

The official story, at least as it is portrayed by the published opinion here, tells the tale of a political non-story in the presidential transition Argentina witnessed this summer. Husband Néstor hands in the presidential sash and the baton to wife Cristina: power ultimately remains under Kirchner’s bed’s sheets. The polls say Argentines voted continuity and that seems to be exactly what they are getting. But what if the notion begins to circulate that a surname starting with K is very much the only similarity there is between the female president and her male predecessor when it comes to steering the nation?

Politics in ephemeral times like these is ultimately a matter of faith. Faith in the postmodern world goes down to a question of marketing. What you see may not be what you get, but what you see is what you believe in. There is something and maybe only one thing Argentines voted for when they voted for continuity: economic bonanza. But there is also something Argentines might not want to learn from their past experiences: economic bonanza cannot be taken for granted. Mostly because it hinges on a handful of so-called globalised variables no government – no matter how popular in polls – can handle. In the case of early 21st century Argentina the said variables boil down to one (if you’ll excuse the reductio ad adsurdum): the Chinese masses’ desire to eat.

That said, one can say President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner can hope for an easy ride for as long as commodity-driven growth continues to fill (some) pockets down here. But the one ghost that stubbornly enjoys haunting this nation is what happens when the money stops rolling in. And it is only then that presidents’ reputations are put to the test.

Cristina is no Néstor. Her maiden name is actually Fernández, a surname of Spanish descent and arguably one of the most ordinary among Argentines. But Cristina, unlike Néstor, does not wish to be ordinary. Néstor Kirchner was maybe as ordinary as a president can (pretend to) be. He was so distinctively different when he stormed into Argentina’s public life – an unknown Patagonian governor with an unpronounceable surname – that his main challenge was to become one among the commoner. And so he did by avoiding anything that smelled like protocol, speaking from the presidential podium with plain words easily accessible and portraying the overall look of a clumsy, feet-on-Earth man like you and me (or maybe more like me than you) fighting the powerful evil-doers of the establishment. Even his prime physical defect, the lazy eye, helped him in this role. Kirchner could LoL at himself and take up the nickname and role character cartoonists gave him: the big-nosed yet cute penguin. Even the movie industry involuntarily lent him a hand by releasing a series of penguin-advocating films: March of the Penguins and most notably the jazzy Happy Feet.

That is all gone with Cristina: the new president is not a penguin. She hails from the province of Buenos Aires and has that flair of high-brow intellectuality typical of a porteño bug. She always looks as if she had spent hours in front of the mirror and produces impeccable pieces of head-of-state discourses every time she appears in public. Her orations can dazzle the urban intelligentsia (just as they did during her long years in Parliament) but will hardly touch the nerve (let alone entertain) the hoi polloi that mans the polls and fills the ballot box.

Cristina likes to repeat the new politics of Latin America have the unprecedented benefit of having leaders that for once resemble their people. The last time she said that one would look around to see Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Brazil’s Lula da Silva, but it might as well be the case that she is herself the exception of her own rule. Penguins either march or dance, but they hardly ever talk nice.

Good things are good while they last. Then they are just a good memory. And most good things, life says, do not last for long. This is true, for instance, for wedding parties. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner seemed to have her wedding feast on 10th December, when she was inaugurated as Argentina’s first elected female president. Clad in immaculate white, giving out tender smiles, Cristina alternatively seemed sweet as Cinderella and tough as Margaret Thatcher as she delivered the best – unread – speech in the recent Argentine politics. It was the perfect cap to the most perfect and smoother transition Argentines can recall after bagging more than 45% of the votes that catapulted her to be her husband’s successor. It also seemed a perfect wedding celebration with a presidential sash and baton instead of rings as tokens of commitment and every Argentine – Kirchner voters and non-voters glued to the TV alike – invited to the media banquet.

Honeymoons are meant to last longer than weddings. But in liquid times we live in, to cite the Eastern European philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, Mrs. President is being put to the test of dealing with the broken pieces of a violent fight even before the honeymoon is done with.

As first lady and presidential candidate, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had promised (via silences more than words) continuity rather than change. But change she seemed to promise (via actions more than words) in her future foreign policy, travelling to the US, Europe, Brazil and México among others during the campaign and setting a tone of reinserting Argentina in the global picture it had virtually dropped out of after becoming an international pariah during the 2001-2 economic calamity. Compared to the sour-talking and protocol-numb Néstor Kirchner, Cristina was Cinderella riding a golden carriage back to Planet Earth.

But on the third day, the dream was over.

The US Department of Justice broke the news on 13th December that a federal prosecutor in Miami had collected evidence that some US$800,000 confiscated in a Buenos Aires airport in the suitcase of a Venezuelan businessman in August could have been earmarked to feed Cristina’s campaign. The man in question, Guido Antonini Wilson, wanted in Argentina, was now cooperating with the FBI and seems headed to a witness protection programme. The US said the news lacked any political implication and merely referred to an independent court investigation. The news, sensu stricto, was part of Washington’s cold war with Venezuela. But Cristina, the sweet first lady-turned princess president, took it as personal as she could.

This is part of garbage tactics the US applies to international politics, she said. I may be a woman, but I won’t let anybody bully me, she added, to make headlines worldwide.

Politics in Argentina, be it domestic or international, are done at a personal rather than state levels. Cristina believes – and so does the man behind the curtains, Néstor Kirchner – that picking up a fight with the world’s sole superpower comes with a lesser cost, at least to their political future, than facing a major corruption scandal that could cripple the new administration for good. And they may be right. Polls, after all, show Argentines with the highest anti-US sentiments in the region are always prone to buying conspiracy theories about the world’s powers-that-be plotting against the otherwise destined-to-supremacy Argentine race. And the polls also show that the Cinderella President is the first one in the recent democratic history of Argentina to reach office with an approval rating lower that than of the outgoing head of state, her husband in this case. Not a minor detail in a country eager to deliver mammoth political crises every once in a little while.