Argentina After the Chainsaw: From Shock to Stability

Argentina did something that few anticipated: it accepted surgery without anesthesia. Tariffs brought into line with reality, prices liberalized, subsidies cut, competitive imports opened up, and so on. The State exposed in its real size, without accounting make-up or rhetorical anesthesia. What for years had been a fiscal fiction sustained by money printing was laid bare in a matter of months. Javier Milei’s government decided to concentrate the adjustment that others had distributed in comfortable inflationary installments. And yet, there was no explosion. Argentina 1 – Peronism 0.

This is already a political event. For years we debated fiscal adjustment as if it were an ideological option. It was not. It was arithmetic. The deficit was neither right-wing nor left-wing. It was a deficit. Inflation was not a narrative. It was inflation. The erosion of the peso was not a cultural metaphor. It was a concrete loss of purchasing power.

The moral debate about adjustment ended the day reality stopped financing the narrative. The correction was a necessary condition. But it will not be sufficient.

The truly difficult stage begins now: turning shock into normality. Because an economy can only tolerate surgery if it believes stability will follow. What it cannot tolerate is permanent uncertainty.

And where does that stability begin? In something less epic and more boring: available credit, credible fiscal rules, declining inflation without semantic tricks.

Argentina tends to experience every transition as if it were a change of regime. That is where our structural problem lies: the pendulum. When the State suffocates, we vote for the chainsaw. When the chainsaw hurts, we ask for shelter. When the shelter suffocates again, we demand another rupture. It is not ideology. It is collective exhaustion.

And that pendular movement carries an invisible cost. Capital does not fear adjustment; it fears the return. It does not invest where it suspects the rules are temporary. It does not make long-term bets if the social contract depends on the electoral mood.

It is not the first time someone has warned us about these tendencies. José Ortega y Gasset, who delivered lectures in Buenos Aires in 1916 and returned in 1939, observed with surgical lucidity certain traits of the Argentine character. He spoke of a tendency toward the “hypertrophy of the ego,” of a public life in which style often precedes substance, where personal affirmation runs faster than institutional construction. He did not say this with disdain, but with intellectual concern: he saw talent, energy, ambition—but also dispersion. And in 1939 he issued an exhortation that still sounds uncomfortably current: “Argentines, to the things!” It was a call to abandon grandiloquence and attend to concrete reality. To stop debating the narrative and begin putting the house in order.

Meanwhile, the opposition is experiencing a “momentum” that is not accidental. Peronism oscillates between silence and the expectation of government exhaustion. It cannot defend the model that left runaway inflation, but neither has it produced an alternative compatible with fiscal balance and monetary stability. Argentine experience shows that, when facing non-Peronist governments, the temptation has not been to stabilize but to accelerate crises. 2001 is the most eloquent reminder: the fall of Fernando de la Rúa was not only an economic implosion; it was also a political dynamic in which territorial and union power chose to push the country into the abyss rather than sustain it.

Waiting for the government to fail in order to return is not a new strategy. It is a familiar practice. And Argentina has paid the price of that logic more than once.

However, the most delicate dilemma falls on the government itself. A leadership can win through rupture. But it consolidates through predictability. The most complex transition for any outsider is not reaching power, but adapting to it. Campaign logic mobilizes; institutional logic stabilizes. Disruption is useful to initiate change. Institutionalization is essential to sustain it.

Argentina does not need acute conflict, nor street confrontation as a permanent method of soft overthrow against any government that unions do not control. It needs architecture. Rules that survive the leader. Judicial independence that does not depend on presidential mood. A coherent foreign policy, not a pendular one. An economic program that continues to function even when charisma fades.

The world is going through a phase of reconfiguration. In that scenario, Argentina is once again generating curiosity. Energy, mining, agro-industry: the assets are there. Society has shown a resilience that surprised even the most skeptical observers.

But international confidence is not romantic. It is pragmatic. It is built on legal stability and continuity. If the program becomes institutionalized, investment will arrive. If it drifts into chronic confrontation or regulatory reversal, it will leave with the same speed with which it came. And here it is worth pausing on the most relevant fact of recent months: society tolerated a severe adjustment without overflowing. That is not resignation. It is maturity.

The question is whether the political leadership will be up to that maturity. Because Argentina does not need another cycle of exaltation and disenchantment. It does not need a new epic promising immediate redemption. It needs something less glamorous and more effective: stability. Epic mobilizes crowds. Stability restores jobs and pays salaries.

And stability, unlike epic, is not sustained by emotional climates on social media. It is administered in silence. That, perhaps, is the real challenge after the chainsaw.