The prospect of a hostile Congress within less than a fortnight has triggered both fears and threats as to a lavish use of presidential vetoes in the next two years but perhaps such concerns are groundless in the light of the economic emergency powers approved by the Senate (by a 38-23 vote) on Wednesday afternoon — these powers together with the odd decree will go far towards permitting President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to skirt parliamentary controls for the rest of her term. Yet it remains another question altogether whether having to rule under an economic emergency can be a source of pride for a government which has reduced poverty from 56 to 15 percent of the population and kept inflation within single digits (at least according to its own data) and which has turned Argentina into a “serious country” with bulging Central Bank reserves, creating millions of jobs. There are only two possible answers to the question of why a government boasting such a success story should lay claim to emergency powers — either the Kirchners have an entirely arbitrary lust for power which leads them to despise Congress and other institutions or else the success story has various holes justifying the extension of an economic emergency such as inflation wildly exceeding the average of a depressed world, energy shortfalls only made tolerable by this year’s slowdown and a rapidly approaching fiscal deficit of serious proportions.

All the extraordinary powers will serve to delay the inevitable deficit by permitting the government to rewrite budgets irrespective of Congress (adding 25 billion pesos overnight by decree) and raid at will the rifled private pension funds entrusted to ANSeS social security administration, also taking advantage of the 10 billion pesos in Special Drawing Rights recently granted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This deficit is light years away from any default (in this sense at least Argentina is becoming a “normal country”) and could be covered easily enough by tapping financial liquidity (which is in better shape than the economy as a whole like in much of the world) — this is indeed very much Economy Minister Amado Boudou’s strategy but the Kirchner taste for leftist posturing (both for its own sake and to humour certain allies) could lead to brutally drastic action and more gratuitous problems.

In a word, the extended emerging powers are a licence to spend, leading to even worse inflation next year which will be even harder to absorb or hide.