When the Veep Has More Power Than the President

Argentina’s Fernández-Fernández governing duo has proven to be a colossal failure.

Appearing side by side in a rare sign of unity, a couple of weeks ago. Image credit: By Casa Rosada. — https://www.casarosada.gob.ar/slider-principal/48822-alberto-fernandez-vamos-a-seguir-apostando-al-crecimiento-al-desarrollo-la-produccion-y-exploracion-de-ypf, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=119180237

Leaving Argentina for a month is always an adventure. You never know if it’ll still be there when you come back, and how high the prices of everything will be.

And that’s kind of what happened this time. Just in the first week I was out of the country, there was an acute financial crisis, the peso lost about 25% of its value, and the finance minister resigned.

They’re now calculating a minimum of 7% inflation for this month. There are shortages of everything, especially imports like coffee.

I’m not even going to pretend to explain — or know — everything that happened while I was traveling halfway across the world to see my family.

But the actually important part is the political crisis that’s been developing in the background since before December 2019, when President Alberto Fernández was elected.

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Alberto Fernández’s presidential candidacy was an outlier from the beginning because of the power struggles behind the coalition. It’s the only campaign I’ve ever heard of that wasn’t even announced by the candidate themselves, but by their vice…