President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner might have announced her political reform yesterday (its contents will be analysed in subsequent editorials) and smoothing the way for the next elections might be the burning priority of the presidential couple but what about everybody else’s priorities? For a start there was a nationwide hospital strike yesterday while Buenos Aires City teachers shunned classes to press for pay increases despite so-called compulsory conciliation and subway workers are threatening to wreak havoc with this evening’s rush hour after yesterday’s traffic chaos caused by a handful of 1982 South Atlantic war veterans — to paraphrase Winston Churchill: “Never in the field of human transport was so much mayhem suffered by so many owing to so few.”

Yet not all the problems lie so visibly above the surface (and this is not a reference to the subways). The opposition (which boycotted yesterday’s announcements) never tires of saying that the only true political reform is ending poverty and they are, of course, right — not merely from the standpoint of social justice but to provide the political emancipation essential for a genuinely free vote. But quite apart from the social time-bomb ticking away amid the collapse of public services, there is acute economic disarray undermining the twin surpluses which were the pride of administration policy in better times. As the 2010 budget is pushed through Congress, nearly two billion more pesos of the private pension funds rifled last year are being transferred to Treasury coffers in exchange for bonds — will this kind of fiscal profligacy (in the process of being enshrined by a two-year suspension of the fiscal responsibility law) encourage holdout creditors to trade in their old bonds for new? As for the trade surplus, a suffocating protectionism this week has brought us to the brink of a trade war with Brazil (and also Mexico). In his lightning visit here the 2008 Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman was fairly soft on the Kirchner economic model or at least its unorthodox premises as well as relatively bullish about the prospects of global upturn but he might have been much harsher if he had been confronted with the scale of Argentina’s protectionism — in other articles Krugman has pointed out that the 1929 crash 80 years ago this month was followed by an 18-month stock exchange recovery and only became deep depression when the massive United States tariffs of 1930 destroyed world trade.

When will the CFK administration understand that in a democracy political power is not an end in itself but a means of serving the voting citizenry?