A working breakfast organized by the Development Studies Center (CED) with the support of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in it golf Club met the economist Augustin Iturralde, executive director of the center, and the political scientist Ignacio Zuasnabar, director of Consulting Teams. The political and economic situation in the region with special emphasis on Argentina —and its correlate in Uruguay- after the election result Compulsory and Simultaneous Open Primaries (PASO) dominated the analysis.
“I would say that it is not possible that in Uruguay Somebody like Javier Miley, with a completely new party and with that type of speech, its market niche is 30%”, Zuasnabar affirmed emphatically, during his speech at the event he attended Scope.com. “In the country, That group of the population that says everything must be resisted is around 10%, so its potential impact on the system is already much lower,” he added.
He based his analysis on the fact that “we still have solid parties, strong parties“Despite the fact that people are not thinking about the elections, when you ask them if the elections were today, what would they vote for, the vast majority of the population already has an answer,” Zuasnabar said.
The director of Equipos Consultores expanded his analysis of the Argentine situation: “Milei is not the cause, she is the symptom, that is to say, it is a phenomenon that responds to deep reasons of the Argentine society which are the ones that explain it. So, rather than looking at the symptom, the reflection should go towards looking at the bottom. It is clear that in Argentina there is very high levels of disappointment and frustration accumulated”.
On whether it is possible that this result could be repeated in the October elections, the political scientist expressed his doubts. “Mathematically it is not ruled out that Milei, who today is like the great freak, may even be left out of the second round. That is why the scenario is uncertain. What is clear is that a new axis is installed in Argentine society. I have read a lot of left-right analysis these days, Argentina turns to the right or to the extreme right. I think these interpretations are debatable because they get into the analysis and in reality it is a totally different cleavage, which has nothing to do with left and right, it has to do with the anti-establishment division”, he explained.
In his turn, the executive director of the CED, Agustín Iturralde, was consulted on whether the promise of dollarization of the economy that Milei proposes in Argentina. “If there were indeed a dollarization of the Argentine economy, we would have, by the way, a more unstable economy next door, probably an economy with more possibilities of becoming more expensive and of exchange rate delay”, He responded, adding that “we are going to have a currency that is not going to respond to the dynamics of the economy. But this would not bring any major news or major problems or major things for Uruguay, It would not be something particularly complex,” said the economist.
The political scene in Uruguay
Zuasnabar also traced his gaze over the political scene of Uruguay on the eve of the election year, pointing out that at the moment there is a scenario that he defined as competitive, with advantage for him Broad front. “The difference between the Broad Front and the Multicolor Coalition at this point it is 5 percentage points, considering the margin of error of the polls. What is obviously missing is not an uncountable difference, ”he considered.
There was also space for the analysis of the main issues of concern to citizens. According to the last monitoring of Equipment, the unsafety still ranks first. Unemployment, for its part, is in second place, while the economic situation was third, followed by education, the water crisis and various social problems.
“It is not that the problems have disappeared, the problems remain, but in both dimensions, both in security and in employment, current perceptions are not so negative, as critical as they were at the end of the last government of the Broad Front. And in this idea of continuity or change and comparative evaluation of governments, these are the things that at the end of the day are going to be weighing, ”said the political scientist when analyzing his data.
How is the Uruguayan economy?
For his part, Iturralde was optimistic about the current state of the local economybeyond the effects of the external situation: “The Uruguayan economy is fine if one looks at the indicators of activity, those of employment and the consumption. Clearly there are some buts that are caused to a large extent by some external shocks that we are facing that are very relevant,” he said.
In this regard, he pointed out that the first is “the weak demand from China not recovering as expected.” He also mentioned “the Argentine nominal instability with the exchange situation that is strongly affecting retail trade, particularly supermarkets” and “the drought that would subtract 2.1 points from the growth product between 2022 and 2023″. Although the director of the CED pointed out that “there would be a rebound effect for 2024 and the total growth of the five-year period”.
In this sense, in the future, the perspective is more favourable, according to the economist. “We’re going to have a growth very important in the second quarter of 2024, which means that today the outlook for economic growth has improved,” he said.
Looking back a few years ago, Iturralde sought differentiate the current situation with that of past decades. “The idea that this could be a context similar to that of the late 90s, prior to the 2002 crisis, was widely spread. I believe that when one looks at the characteristics, for different reasons, this is very different from that. Yes there are exchange mismatch, but the first thing that is different is the exchange regime which is not just free exploitation. At that time, for the government it was a problem for the dollar to rise. If the dollar rose, the Uruguayan government at the time had a problem because it was in debt in dollars, because the people were in debt in dollars and because it had to go out and intervene. Right now, I think on the 11th floor in the executive tower and in the Central bank, If the dollar starts to rise, they will be happy and much more relieved”, assured the director of the CED.
Source: Ambito
