It's difficult to get somebody else to see things as you see them. People will just insist on seeing things the way it suits them best. Take former president Néstor Kirchner, the ruling party candidate who lost the midterm elections in Buenos Aires province on June 28. Kirchner, speaking at a rare press conference in the Greater Buenos Aires district of Tres de Febrero on Wednesday, said the outcome of the midterm elections showed that voters "want us to deepen the model." Yes, Kirchner admitted defeat in Buenos Aires province at the hands of Francisco de Narváez of the centre-right coalition Unión-PRO. But nationwide, he said, "we're still the first minority."

Arguably this is true. The ruling Victory Front won just over 30 percent of the vote nationwide, just edging the Social and Civic Accord (a front that includes the Radical Party, the Civic Coalition and Vice-President Julio Cobos' party ConFe). But you could well argue that this is not enough to hide defeat. Kirchner's party also lost in Santa Fe, Córdoba, Mendoza, Entre Ríos and even in Santa Cruz, his native province. But Kirchner will be one to argue. "We are," he insisted flanked by Buenos Aires Governor Daniel Scioli and a group of Peronist mayors from working-class Greater Buenos Aires, "the first minority."

Well, maybe. But Kirchner should have been humbled - humiliated even - by his defeat in Buenos Aires province, a Peronist stronghold. Kirchner, now a deputy-elect, quit as leader of the Peronist party on June 29, the day after he lost, and handed over power to Scioli. But on Wednesday he was still talking like the man in charge. Kirchner probably met with the Greater Buenos Aires mayors in a bid to quash dissent and possible defections to the dissident Peronist camp, which includes De Narváez and Felipe Solá (the former governor of Buenos Aires province who was also an Unión-PRO candidate in June). Solá is already behaving like a potential presidential contender. But the news is that Kirchner's party has not fallen apart.

Kirchner dined with Scioli and the mayors and is keeping a watchful eye on their moves. The Peronist-led Victory Front is also holding its ground in Congress after defeat.
Congress has voted in favour of extending the powers it delegated on the Executive, including the right to slap export duties. The administration of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner also announced earlier this month an agreement, worth 600 million pesos a year, with the Argentine Football Association (AFA) to show first division games on state-run television.

The contract with AFA was a symbolic punch thrown against the media group Clarín, which partly owned the pay-per-view company that had the rights to football until 2014. Kirchner has accused the media group of using its big-selling daily, Clarín, to manipulate public opinion and wrestle favours from governments since the return to democracy in 1983.

Ernestina Herrera de Noble, the Clarín group head, said on Thursday she would not yield to "pressure" and claimed that the daily is being bullied by the state because it champions freedom of speech.

Ask the opposition and they will spell it out loud and clear: 70 percent of voters don't like Kirchner's "model" and would rather not see it "deepened," thank you very much. But how is it then possible for Kirchner, who considers himself a militant lefwing Peronist out to slay vested interest, to throw his punch at Clarín when he should be at his weakest? Kirchner may still crash. But it looks like he wants bring Clarín crashing down to the ground with him.
The opposition should be fit after June's victory. Yet ironically it is struggling to stick together after the President called consensus talks on July 9 to discuss the reform of the political system.

Still the ruling party can't afford any defeats in Congress. The new Congress, with the lawmakers elected in June, is scheduled to convene in December. Technically the current Congress is the product of the 2007 election, which was won easily by Fernández de Kirchner.

The midterm elections were originally scheduled to take place in October of this year. But the government brought the elections forward to June 28, in what was apparently a desperate bid to avoid a bad defeat.

The Kirchners' popularity plummeted last year during the standoff with the farmers over export duties. Their popularity now stands at 30 percent, which is roughly the votes they garnered in June. Thirty-percent is enough for Kirchner to bleat, "we are the first minority."

Suddenly, even in defeat, the ruling party feels fit enough to buy the rights to football and extend for one more year the prerogative to set export duties.
In reality, the government seems to be feeling even stronger than that. The President announced on Thursday that she has sent a new media bill to Congress, which according to its backers is designed to put an end to flagrantly abusive monopolies.

"Freedom of speech," Fernández de Kirchner said during a ceremony in Government House, "does not mean freedom to blackmail." If approved the bill will force media groups like Clarín to drop licences and companies within a year.

The bill also grants the state more clout to regulate the cable television industry, which is currently also dominated by Grupo Clarín.
The President said she was sponsoring the bill in the name of 118 journalists who disappeared during the last military dictatorship. The current media law was originally passed during the dictatorship (and amended many times since then). The current law, the President and her supporters said, is outdated and the work of dictators. It must be put right by approving a new law.

Yet critics say that this is not the right time to debate such a drastic reform of the media.

City of Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri, the leader of PRO, said that what the President intends to do "is legal, but not legitimate" because the lawmakers elected in June have yet to take their seats. Dissident Peronist Senator Carlos Reutemann said on Thursday that with the reform the President "is imitating (Venezuelan President Hugo) Chávez."
De Narváez - who is part of an opposition troika with Macri and Solá - said that the debate should be left up to the "the new Congress" once it sits in December. Lawmakers of the Civic Coalition and the Radical Party also voiced fierce opposition to the bill. But the three main opposition parties spoke at separate press conferences.

The Civic Coalition, headed by Elisa Carrió, and the Radical Party are still technically allies in the Accord. The separate press conferences show that they mistrust each other and that the Accord could soon be no more.

The Vice-President meanwhile complained in a statement that the media bill should not be tabled "from a perspective of conflict."

Cobos, a dissident Radical who last year famously sided with the farmers against the Kirchners, is currently one of the most popular politicians in the land and the Radical Party's likely presidential candidate in 2011.

"A perspective of conflict" seems to be Kirchner's idea of fun. Deputy Carlos Kunkel, a member of Kirchner's inner circle, said on Thursday he expects the media bill, which for better or for worse brings a sweeping reform, to be approved by Congress within "30 days.''

A group of small centre-left parties, which hold about 15 seats in the 257-seat Lower House, meanwhile said they could back the media bill, which has been praised by some leftwing intellectuals because it grants more rights to NGOs.

Yet it is entirely possible that Kirchner, who once likened newspapers to "guns" in the past used by dictators to defend the powerful, is championing a revolutionary reform of the media only to crush Clarín, the nation's biggest selling newspaper.

How come Kichner, after losing, can behave like somebody who has power? Critics accuse Kirchner of amassing such power by presiding over a vast crony capitalist network that is half-crooked. The government last year also fattened its coffers when it prodded Congress into taking over about 24 billion dollars until then controlled by private pension funds.

The ruling party looked really frail politically when it was defeated in June. But capitalism the world over has crashed, which means the Fernández de Kirchner administration now probably has more cash than do most private companies (enough, for example to outbid Clarín and clinch the football contract).

Argentina is an institutional mess, yes. But where is the whopping economic crisis that usually goes with it and forces government's to collapse? The government has been accused of crassly manipulating the inflation rate as reported by the INDEC statistics bureau since 2007. Unemployment has increased to 8.8 percent from 8 percent in a year. Most private economists agree that the country, after growing consistently since 2002, is in a recession.

Yet most experts also agree that all this does not amount to a crash like the one that brought down the administration of Fernando de la Rúa late in 2001.

Nicolás Eyzaguirre, head of the International Monetary Fund's Western Hemisphere Department, said that Argentina's financial system is well and also praised its fiscal surplus. Eyzaguirre met with Economy Minister Amado Boudou in Buenos Aires on Wednesday.

Argentina and the IMF are formally not speaking to each other since Kirchner, when president in 2006, cancelled 9.8 billion dollars in debt.

Boudou on Friday said that there is a "50-50 chance" that Argentina will seek a loan from the IMF. Kirchner on Thursday said Argentina "must return to capital markets" but without losing "its sovereign" right to design its economic policy. At issue is the IMF's Article 4, which would allow it to monitor the economy if Argentina takes a loan.
Argentina and the IMF are now informally talking to each other. But the Fernández de Kirchner administration would have to field difficult questions, say, about the INDEC, if and when those talks get more formal. Boudou, in a bid to take some of the pressure off the controversial inflation rate, has announced a 2.1-billion-dollar swap of inflation-linked bonds. INDEC officials on Friday also revealed the data it uses to measure inflation. Boudou has also announced that the INDEC will be monitored by a council of academics and by another council of bankers, business leaders and consumer groups. The INDEC is currently not credible, critics say. But Boudou seems to be aiming to make the INDEC credible again - at least to Eyzaguirre and the IMF.

The feeling right after the election loss was that the government was on the way out. But it is still trying to move at breakneck speed. At times Kirchner's whirlwind politics is too fast and bruising even for the good of the ruling party.

The President has vetoed an article of a farming emergency bill, which was unanimously approved in Congress and which (in an article sponsored by De Narváez) included export duty breaks for farmers in 37 districts in Buenos Aires province.

The veto infuriated the farmers. Aníbal Fernández, the Cabinet chief, said the breaks were impracticable because grains had already been sent to market this year. The government also accused farmers' leaders of using the break as an excuse to evade duties by sending all their grains to market through the 37 districts. The Cabinet chief said the ruling party had approved the breaks "by mistake." A ruling party lawmaker admitted that he had failed to quash the article before the entire farming emergency bill was hurriedly approved.

The Liaison Board, which groups the nation's four main farm lobbies, called an eight-day strike to protest the veto on Tuesday. The strike started on Friday and is scheduled to end on September 4. The Board said it was not promoting roadblocks. But farmers on Friday staged demonstrations by the side of many highways, especially in Buenos Aires province. The Board was left with no choice but to call a strike under pressure from its grass roots who are determined to defeat the Kirchners once again like they did last year.

Kirchner on Wednesday was forced to dismiss as "absurd" speculation that the government was planning to further increase soybean export duties from 35 percent to 45 percent.
The ruling party fell apart during last year's war with the farmers. Yet now, in a smaller scale, the opposite seems to be happening. María del Carmen Alarcón, the leader of the pro-farm group Pampa Sur, has confirmed that she will work for the Cabinet chief. Alarcón, who originally quit the Victory Front when she was a lawmaker in 2006 and was a hero to farmers for a while, was currently an official serving in the Socialist administration of Santa Fe Governor Hermes Binner.

Alarcón's sudden move came on the heels of dissident Peronist Senator Roxana Latorre's surprise decision to sign the committee resolution that allowed the Kirchnerites to approve the delegation of powers in the Senate.

Latorre's decision infuriated Reutemann who decided to throw her out of his two-seat caucus in the Senate. Reutemann on Monday, asked if the government was scheming in the shadows to ruin him, stated that he "doesn't give a damn" about a potential presidential candidacy and literally stated that "they can shove it up their arse."

Reutemann, a former Formula One star, was used to driving fast on smooth roads. But suddenly he is caught in a demolition derby in which mischievous Kirchner, even in defeat, is trying to crash his car.

Latorre voted against the delegation of powers. But she has also accused the farmers of crossing the institutional line and wanting to force Fernández de Kirchner out of office before the end of her mandate.

Here's another key opposition leader who meanwhile has been hit by problems: Macri. The mayor announced on Wednesday that Jorge Palacios had resigned as head of the newly-created Metropolitan Police citing "personal reasons." Palacios, a former Federal Police inspector sacked by Kirchner for alleged corruption in 2004, is currently being accused of trying to obstruct the investigation into the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre. Macri had refused to give in to intense pressure, especially by Jewish community leaders, not to appoint Palacios. Macri claimed that there was a "political" campaign to discredit Palacios. The mayor was also criticized for not attending the ceremony on August 18 to remember the attack. Macri and Palacios were criticized at the ceremony by the relatives of those killed in the attack.

Macri's centre-right party PRO won the midterm elections in Buenos Aires, but only with a disappointing 31 percent of the votes. His credibility, at least temporarily, could be further damaged by the Palacios case and by his decision not to attend the annual AMIA ceremony. Yet there's still an outside chance that Palacios (and Macri) will be redeemed if the former police chief is cleared in court .

There's also speculation that the Unión-PRO troika (De Narváez-Macri-Solá) is constantly on the verge of a rift.

De Narváez had originally declared that he would seek to run for Buenos Aires province governor in 2011 because the Constitution does not allow him to run for president for being born in Colombia to non-Argentine parents. But De Narváez is now saying that he intends to run for governor, but that he also has a legal right to run for president one day because he is an Argentine citizen.

Macri looked like the strongest man of the centre-right troika before the elections. But now De Narváez and Solá look stronger. Solá, a governor between 2002-2007 with many contacts in the Peronist party, could also seek an alliance with Reutemann to challenge the Kirchners with the backing of other dissidents like former Entre Ríos Governor Jorge Busti.

The President, to the fury of the farmers by the side of the road, can legally stay in office until 2011. Fernández de Kirchner on Friday hosted a summit of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) in Bariloche. She played a prominent role as mediator between US-ally Colombia and its edgy leftist neighbours Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. At issue: Colombia's decision to grant US forces the use of seven military bases. Colombia will go ahead with its agreement with the US as planned, President Alvaro Uribe told the summit on Friday. But Unasur leaders agreed that the situation would be monitored by a regional defence committee and declared that foreign forces should not be allowed to turn into a threat.