Just as Chinese national day (at least for Taiwan) falling on the day seemed to be a suitable occasion to write about China last Saturday, so Peronist Loyalty Day today points to Peronism as this week’s topic.
Defining Peronism is an elusive exercise ultimately surpassing the space available to this column – its founder liked to say: “When I define, I exclude.” Artificial Intelligence informs us: “Peronism (also known as Justicialism) is a broad political movement and ideology founded by President Juan Perón and Eva Perón in the 1940s” – a definition which does not take us much further. “Populism” is the easy answer offered by lazy analysts but that tag extends to any politics offering easy answers, covering a multitude of sins.
Looking over the eight decades since the Peronist Loyalty Day of 1945 which remains the movement’s official date of birth, it can only be concluded that there is no such thing as a Peronist film but rather a disjointed series of photographs. The three core principles – social justice, economic independence and political sovereignty – have not stood the test of time. In the last decade of the past century Carlos Menem drove a coach and horses through the latter two principles (and the “third position” for good measure) while Cristina Fernández de Kirchner likes to point out that businessmen made juicier profits under her régime than under either the Mauricio Macri or Javier Milei alternatives.
Perhaps the only consistent thread of all these variants in the Peronist fabric is the line “Combatiendo al capital” in the song ‘Los muchachos peronistas’ because the net result of Peronism accounting for 40 of the 59 years of civilian government in those eight decades has been a country only now beginning a precarious transformation into a market economy vulnerable to interruption next year.
One way of shrugging off inconsistencies by entities considered or defining themselves as “too big to fail” is to argue that they are large enough to contain their own contradictions and that the greater the scale of a historical development, the bigger the margin of error – Soviet Russia, the European Union, the Catholic Church and countries like India are all cases in point when it comes to this line of argument and Peronists could see themselves falling into this category easily enough. But with them a tolerance of self-contradiction would be well and fine if it were accompanied by an acceptance of contradiction from elsewhere – not a strong point of Peronism. Contradictions are healthier when reflecting a pluralistic society rather than an omni-absorbent movement seeking unanimity.
Peronism combines a stubborn failure to evolve into this century with being a precursor of current politics in some ways. Around the time of that first Peronist Loyalty Day in 1945, parties identified themselves as conservative, liberal, socialist, Christian Democrat, Communist or whatever but hardly anybody was so presumptuous as to stamp their surnames on any party – even the likes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini kept their names out of their Nazi and fascist branding. Juan Domingo Perón was almost the first person to turn Walt Whitman’s “I am multitudes” into a political manifesto. When this columnist was asked by European visitors in the past century to name an equivalent of Peronism in their continent, he could not do much better than Gaullism (or perhaps Fianna Fáil as then the voice of the quaint people of Ireland). Since then, Gaullism is nowhere and everywhere in French politics while Fianna Fáil have moved firmly into the middle of the road but political groupings identifying with an individual rather than an ideology are proliferating worldwide – starting with Argentina where there is hardly an “ismo” not preceded by a surname.
Since today is Peronist Loyalty Day, some explanation of the day itself is in order, especially for those new in town. Eight days beforehand in 1945, Perón was obliged to resign from all his posts – as the vice-president of military president Edelmiro Farrell in the previous 15 months, War (Defence) Minister in the previous 18 and Labour Secretary since 1943. In the latter role, he extended such benefits as severance for all workers along with pensions and collective wage bargaining for millions, in the process clinching the support of such important trade unionists as Angel Borlenghi (shop workers), Juan Bramuglia (railwaymen) and Cipriano Reyes (meat packers). When Perón was sent under arrest to the island of Martín García in the preceding weekend (October 17 was a Wednesday that year), the CGT trade union organisation met on the Tuesday and called a general strike for October 18 but their workers beat them to it, spontaneously converging on Plaza de Mayo a day ahead in numbers estimated at some 300,000 to press for Perón’s release. This was granted by a panic-stricken Farrell and Perón was whisked to a Casa Rosada balcony where he made a famous speech that evening beginning with a self-definition as “a soldier, a patriot and el primer trabajador (“the first worker”)” while describing the mob in front of him as a “true celebration of democracy.” He married Eva Duarte five days later and the rest is history, as they say.
Since then celebration of today’s milestone has varied – driven underground during military juntas (when it was renamed Day of Peronist Resistance), it was a mass festival of somewhat synthetic exuberance under Peronist governments and always a rallying-point for Peronist militants and trade unionists. But there has not been a unified Peronist Loyalty Day celebration since 2019, just 10 days before the elections ejecting Mauricio Macri from the Presidency – a cause which seemed to bring them altogether. Since then the occasion has been fragmented into new “ismos” – not only Kirchnerism but followers of Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof, Sergio Massa’s Frente Renovador (“Renewal Front”), etc. Divisions which stand to be repeated today with Kicillof marking the event in La Matanza and Kirchnerites congregating outside the Constitución flat of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s house arrest.
