The debate in the region: how much state is needed to balance the ground

This is extremely complex for Argentina, which is heading for a presidential election in a region undergoing political upheaval. Especially as society looks at its neighbors and wonders how much each country and every political project can have some influence on the local vote.

The most direct objective is no longer Venezuela, a country whose reality is remote and from which we obtain more information on the experiences of its emigrants, than on the daily newspaper administered by Nicolás Maduro. The shortage, the inflation, the shortages, are repeated records which ended up being absorbed like another condiment of the policy.

All the diplomatic artillery that Mauricio Macri's government has indicted against the Venezuelan regime seems somewhat removed from the dramatic social drama in which Chile has been involved, the country with the region's best economic performance and unresolved inequality. by his model.

Bolivia appears on the other side, where Morales' claim to perpetuate himself in a fourth term was suspected of fraud because of the strange suspension of the election night scrutiny. . And if anything was missing, Brazil had just come on the scene, thanks to the recent legal approval of the pension reform.

The realities of Venezuela, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil question Argentina's candidates differently

Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile and Brazil are different political projects. The most kirchner wing of the Frente de Todos is more attentive to the movement of the old, because of its proximity to Cristina Kirchner during his administration rather than pretending to use it as a d & rsquo; A mirror.

Mauricio Macri looks worried as Sebastian Piñera's center-right proposal collapses and fears a more discursive than real contagion. On the other hand, Bolsonaro has been up to now a stimulant for the changes that he has not made during his four years in office: first with the reform of work and now with the pension reform. However, Brazil is not yet a success story that can be used to expose or imitate. The Argentine President has tried these recipes and turned to other formulas.

The problem at the local level is that Chile has been a good student in several subjects (it is growing at a reasonable rate with an annual inflation of 3%), but it causes differences in its society that neither of the two political cycles has managed to solve: the Concertación, nor the socialism of Michelle Bachelet nor Piñera.

But it is this businessman, who was elected to increase Chile's prosperity, who has been hard-pressed by the people to solve the problem. Like what happened in Macri, he has to adopt a drug he does not believe in the short term, since the market does not solve everything. It remains to be seen whether this larger state intervention will be implemented to cope with change or whether, as it may be the case in Argentina, it must mobilize deeper decisions.