The ebbing of the pink tide

FOR the past 18 months or so Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has ruthlessly subordinated Argentina’s economy and some of its institutions to a single aim: preserving her own popularity and thus securing the election of her chosen successor as the country’s president. She ran down the Central Bank’s reserves to next to nothing to maintain an overvalued official exchange rate. She ran up a fiscal deficit of 6% of GDP and spurned an inevitable deal with holdout creditors, raising its eventual cost.Under her spell her hapless candidate, Daniel Scioli, an essentially moderate man, shrilly repeated that Mauricio Macri, his centre-right challenger in a run-off on November 22nd, was the puppet of evil global forces such as the IMF, foreign multinationals, “neoliberal adjustment” and so on. A similar strategy propelled Dilma Rousseff to a second term in Brazil’s presidential election a year ago. It is to the credit of Argentines that they saw through it. They chose Mr Macri, albeit by a margin of less than three percentage points.