By James Neilson

Argentine politics have always been peculiar, but with the possible exception of the days when José López Rega, a character popularly known as “the warlock” or “wizard” because of his taste for the occult, ruled the country, they have never been quite as peculiar as they are right now. Unlike López Rega, who at least held the Social Welfare portfolio, Argentina’s current ruler, Néstor Kirchner, is not even a member of the government. He is just a private citizen who, because he is the president’s husband, is allowed to manage the national economy as he sees fit, hire and fire ministers, secretaries, undersecretaries and anyone else, make or break alliances with foreign potentates and declare war against both the country’s farmers and its biggest media conglomerate. In fact, he wields more power than any president, not excluding the military ones, since the glory days of Juan Domingo Perón.
This bizarre situation would be understandable if Kirchner were a marvellous orator who oozed so much charisma that most of his compatriots simply adored him, but that is far from being the case.  It is generally agreed that he is a lousy speaker, that he is anything but charismatic, and that together with Cristina he is among the least popular politicians around. If the opinion polls are to be believed, were elections held tomorrow he would be lucky to get more than five percent of the votes, a fraction of what Carlos Menem received in 2003 when, glumly conscious that he would be slaughtered were he to risk a run-off against Kirchner, he withdrew despite having beaten him in the first round.
How does Néstor get away with it?  He does so by playing on the widespread fear that should anyone try to rein him in the result could be a monumental crisis.  Memories of what happened when Fernando de la Rúa was chased out of office by the mob still haunt Argentina’s political elite whose leading lights suspect that the country’s ramshackle institutions would be in no shape to handle the sudden collapse of the government that was elected in 2007. 
Kirchner and his friends are fully aware of this.  That is why from time to time some of them remind the country that, should President Cristina feel unable to govern as she would like, she and her husband would be only too happy to decamp to southern Patagonia , leaving Vice-President Julio Cobos to take care of the mess they would leave behind. As neither Cobos nor anyone else fancies the prospect of having to take charge of Argentina in such unpromising circumstances, opposition politicians respond by telling everyone to calm down and prepare for the 2011 elections.  Unfortunately, these are still over two years away, and there are those who are inclined to doubt that it would really be  in the country’s best interests to put up with Kirchner’s woefully inefficient, and increasingly arbitrary, government until then.  Though senior politicians tell themselves that once the Congress that was elected back in June finally gets down to work, Mr and Mrs Kirchner will have no choice but to behave in a less alarming fashion, that could be merely wishful thinking.
Unhappily for the many who want Argentina to stick to the constitutional timetable for a change, events are beginning to speed up. Hardly a day goes by without the embattled media coming up with fairly convincing evidence that the Kirchners have been shamelessly making the most of the many opportunities they have created to enrich themselves and their cronies. Some of the charges that have been made have already been taken up by the judiciary.  As the word gets around that they are on their way out, more and more judges will decide that the time has come to take seriously such matters as the explosive growth of the couple’s personal fortune, the still mysterious fate of a huge sum of money belonging to the province of Santa Cruz, the expensive fleet of airliners that is at their disposal and a great deal else besides.  
Time is running out for the Kirchners. Their “strategy” of making enemies of large numbers of once prominent people in the belief that a majority would support them against the old establishment functioned very well for a few years, but then the tide turned.  Life was easy for them when they could win popularity by putting the boot into a bevy of elderly soldiers with blood on their hands, “orthodox” economists allegedly responsible for ruining the country, undistinguished Supreme Court judges associated with Menem and foreign businessmen who prospered mightily under the previous dispensation, but now they are up against the urban middle class, the farmers, business representatives and much of the press, as well, of course, as the many politicians who heartily despise them.
This array could soon be joined by a huge number of desperately poor people from the festering shanty towns of Greater Buenos Aires, where the local mayors whose job is to keep them quiet are fed up with both Cristina and Néstor.  Should that happen, and it well could unless the economy picks up smartly very soon, the couple’s hold on power, based as it is on the fear that at any moment the country could once again spin out of control, would surely be broken. And that, for them, would be that.