By Michael Soltys

The issue of nationalization versus privatization is not a red herring (as claimed alike by both Buenos Aires Governor Daniel Scioli and Gabriela Michetti, the leading PRO centre-right candidate in this city) and nor is it a source of running contradictions for the Unión-PRO alliance (with City Mayor Mauricio Macri calling for the reprivatization of Aerolíneas Argentinas and the pension system while the top Unión-PRO candidate in Buenos Aires province, Francisco de Narváez, blows both ways, also defending state ownership of YPF oil, railways and utilities).

This is not just an abstract debate about the respective virtues of the private and public sectors but a concern for the present and immediate future, as shown by the injection of the fate of the La Serenísima dairy company into the campaign by ex-president Néstor Kirchner. The Kirchners are apparently so convinced that nationalization is the way of a crisis-stricken world that the leading Victory Front candidate in Buenos Aires province speaks of using state money to bail out La Serenísima rather than see it pass to its main creditor, the French Danone group. If this state money is to come out of the private pension funds confiscated by the ANSeS social security administration, this would represent a new level of abuse of pension savings — it is bad enough to use them for widespread electioneering (90 percent of highway construction, for example) but spending future pensions on gratuitously blocking the foreign investment the country so badly needs in the name of economic nationalism is a new low. If asked to state his preference, veteran La Serenísima owner Pascual Mastellone would probably declare a plague on both houses — both against a hostile French takeover and the relentless state price controls (75 cents per litre of milk) which have reduced his company to its present quandary. The specific example of La Serenísima shows that the issue is not so simple as nationalization versus privatization — the strategy rather takes the form of knocking down the value of companies via state interference (a public-sector version of asset-stripping) to leave them vulnerable to crony capitalism as much as public ownership.

Ultimately, the debate about nationalization and privatization is not so much about ideology as interests (as is also evidently the case with the controversial new media law) and this needs to be brought out into the open. If the elections do not also concern the role of the state in the economy, then what are they about?