Alberto Fernández's complex first year in office

A little over a year ago, on 10 December 2019, Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner entered the Chamber of Deputies, where they were to be sworn in as president and vice-president of Argentina. Previously, Alberto Fernández embraced outgoing president Mauricio Macri in a gesture of détente while the former president coldly shook hands with her former political rival for four years.

Peronism returned to the Casa Rosada, thanks to a broad alliance that encompassed all factions of one of the oldest political movements in the country, and Macri received a country mired in a serious economic crisis, with a foreign debt unleashed and an agreement signed with the International Monetary Fund.

The data were discouraging. Inflation stood at 50%, the devaluation of the peso accumulated 540%, nearly 40% of the population at risk of poverty, 11% unemployment and debt at 95% of GDP.

On the second day of her presidency, Fernández announced that they would focus on growth first in order to be able to pay off the debt contracted by the previous government, and also to renegotiate that debt. The plan was to ask the IMF for a 24-month extension. The newly elected president stressed that he had "the will to pay, but not the means to do so".

On a more political level, there were certain expectations of a president who promised to unite Argentina and close the unbridgeable gap between Peronists and anti-Peronists that had seemed to be the driving force behind Argentine politics in recent decades.

The president's economic plans went awry in the wake of the health crisis unleashed by COVID-19. Poverty rates now stand at 44 per cent and the national currency has plunged with inflation running at 38.5 per cent over the past year. Official data estimate GDP to fall by 10% in 2020, along with Peru, the worst figure in the region. 

As for the renegotiation of the foreign debt, the finance minister, Martín Guzmán, a young finance expert apprenticed to Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, scored a victory by achieving a deferral of payments with private creditors and a small interest rate cut. However, no agreement has yet been reached with the IMF, although, according to IMF spokesman Gerry Rice, the latest talks are on track.

This week, Fernández in her speech at the opening of congressional sessions announced a criminal complaint "to determine who were the authors and participants in the greatest fraudulent administration and embezzlement of funds in our history", in reference to the $44 billion loan, which could cause serious problems for former president Mauricio Macri.

Unable to access the credit market, the government has been forced to issue 1.2 trillion pesos, which has led to an increase in inflation, with prices rising by 4%.

According to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC), consumption fell by more than 20% in 2020. For its part, the Argentine Confederation of Medium-sized Businesses (CAME) estimates a 14.9% drop in sales in shops and an accumulated loss of 26.2% in 2020.

To strengthen the state coffers and be able to cope with the social and economic effects of the coronavirus, the government will apply an extra tax on large fortunes, a decision that was not well received by the country's economic elites. They hope to raise 300 million pesos from wealth in excess of 200 million pesos, or approximately 12,000 people.

COVID-19 has resulted in 52,192 fatalities and there are currently 149,548 positive cases. The good news is that since the start of the vaccination campaign in December, 1,179,524 citizens have been vaccinated, of whom 873,347 have received the first dose and 306,177 have received both doses.

The Sputnik V, of which 1,220,000 of the agreed 20 million have received, was the first to be used in December when vaccination began. The government also has agreements to receive doses from AstraZeneca/Oxford and Sinopharm. It is also a member of the WHO's COVAX mechanism, which helps facilitate the procurement of vaccines for developing countries, and is even developing a local vaccine, although its viability in humans will not be known for another year and a half.

The vaccination has not been without controversy, however, due to the so-called VIP vaccination centre, which was uncovered by journalist Horacio Verbitsky, who said that the Ministry of Health offered to vaccinate him directly. In total, 70 people received the vaccine ahead of time, including prominent personalities such as the pro-government senator Jorge Taiana. A scandal that ended with the resignation of the Minister of Health, Ginés González.

In 2018, the bill on the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy was approved in the Chamber of Deputies, but rejected in the Senate. One of the campaign promises of the Fernandez tandem was to try again to pass a law that provoked much social debate and division on the streets and in Parliament.

Once again the Chamber of Deputies gave the go-ahead on 11 December and the Senate on this occasion, in a less close vote than expected, gave the green light on 30 December with 38 affirmative votes and 29 negative votes. It was a politically cross-cutting vote, with both members of the ruling party and the opposition voting in favour and against.

It is possibly Fernández's greatest success to date. A campaign promise fulfilled barely a year after taking office that will put an end to the estimated 450,000 clandestine abortions a year in Argentina.

In July last year Fernández stirred up controversy by proposing a reform of the judicial law. The president claimed that the aim was to make the judiciary more independent, an institution that according to opinion polls is not well regarded by Argentines.

His detractors accused him of seeking to put an end to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's pending cases. The vice-president, for her part, has continued the battle against the judiciary, which she accuses of "leading and directing" the process of 'lawfare', that is, abusively using judicial institutions to attack a political opponent under the guise of legality.

Fernández has defended her vice-president, saying in a recent interview with the Argentinean newspaper Página 12 that "she wants a legal system that allows her to prove her innocence and not a system of persecution that does not want to listen to her".

The reform was approved in the Senate in August and subsequently passed to the Chamber of Deputies, which froze the debate until the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the reform.

The relationship between the executive and the judiciary is increasingly tense. Just this week, the president said at the beginning of Congress' sessions that "the judiciary is in crisis. It is the only power that seems to live on the margins of the republican system. The corporate relationship that links them has caused them to remain in office well beyond the age limit that the law imposes", to the astonished gaze of the Supreme Court justices who watched the speech virtually.

In the regional sphere, one of the most notable actions is the support given to Evo Morales after the 2019 coup d'état, which he welcomed after his stay in Mexico and ended up bidding farewell to in a small event on the border between Argentina and Bolivia when the former Bolivian president returned to his country after the victory of his party's candidate Luis Arce in the presidential elections.

One of Fernández's foreign policy objectives is to create a new progressive axis in Latin America, an issue he addressed during his visit to Mexico last week, where he had the opportunity to discuss this and other issues with his counterpart Andrés Manuel López Obrador. "From the northernmost country to the southernmost, we must be able to trace an axis that unites the entire continent," he said.

The president is also a member of the so-called Puebla Group, an organisation that brings together the region's progressive leaders, both current and former presidents. Rafael Correa, Lula da Silva, Luis Arce and Andrés Arauz, among others.

With the successes and difficulties, the Argentine president's popularity remains at 50%, a figure that is far from the 80% approval rating he had in April 2020, and with a 47% rejection rate.