Last week, a consultant and pollster who was one of the most sought-after in the Argentine market held a “focus group” for a governor. He couldn’t get over his astonishment: “Lower middle class retirees who even take away PAMI benefits are telling you that There is no choice but to pay the previous government’s party!”

The retiree in the interviewer’s focus group was faithfully representing that unusual moment in which Argentine public opinion is today and which resembles the upside-down kingdom – paraphrasing María Elena Walsh’s song – in which “a bird swims and a bird flies. “fish”: did public opinion analysts ever imagine that even the IMF was going to have to ask an Argentine president for clemency with the most vulnerable in the midst of a fierce adjustment and with a brutal drop in sales, production and purchasing power, and the image and his government’s approval was going to rise?

Read also: The “micro” can wait: in the absence of structural reforms, Milei is betting everything on lowering inflation

The International Monetary Fund – at least in Argentina – can no longer be branded as the bogeyman of the “wild adjustment of the Fund”, that cliche so used by the left and Peronism to humiliate any government that should come to the aid of the international credit organization.

IMF advice and surveys

IMF number two Gita Gopinath told Milei in February to seek more consensus for his reforms; and this week Rodrigo Valdés, the head of the organization’s Western Hemisphere Department, directly asked the government “that the weight of the adjustment does not fall disproportionately on working families”: the IMF with its request for mercy towards the poor left Milei well to the «right” of the organization so repudiated by the Argentine left.

But the latest surveys that were published during the week are showing that in this “upside down kingdom”, The “wild” adjustment of the economy suits Milei’s imagewhen all the consultants were predicting a deepening of the decline in management approval recorded in February:

• The respected Government Trust Index measured month by month by the Torcuato Di Tella University showed a surprising 12 percent jump of the indicator in March versus February, and today it is even minimally higher than in December, when Milei was the big news and the winner of the elections.
• The traditional survey by the University of San Andrés, which had measured a small drop in management approval in February, with a rejection that had been placed slightly above the positive, now shows that in March the curves inverted againwith a “thumbs up” of 51 percent.
• The pollster Analogies, linked to Máximo Kirchner and La Cámpora, indicates in its March national measurement that 49 percent believe that in two years the economic situation will be better, versus 41 percent, which is going to be worse. Consulting firm K also measures that Milei has more positive than negative image.

Encouraging data for Javier Milei in a bad context

The context in which these encouraging data for Milei occur could not be worse: in February the Chamber of Commerce registered a 3.5 percent drop in its Consumption Indicator. The IPI – INDEC Industrial Production Index – shows a drop in January of 12 percent compared to the previous year. The average Argentine salary today is barely a third of that of workers in neighboring Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, with less than $200, according to the consulting firm Focus Market. Other indicators speak of sectors with a sales drop of more than 20 points compared to the previous year.

The secret of the “Milei Paradigm”, which is already being studied worldwide, indicates that, as long as a majority understands that the fault for the current economic sufferings lies with the previous government, as demonstrated a few days ago by the pollster Opina Argentina, people stoically tolerate the “wild fit.”

For “traditional” politics, this novelty represents a challenge for which it was not prepared. An example was given by Enrique “Pepe” Albistur, former Media Secretary of Néstor Kirchner and historic Peronist electoral campaign publicist. He is the husband of the Peronist representative Victoria Tolosa Paz and was known as an alleged “lender” of the Puerto Madero department of former president Alberto Fernández.

“Pepe” Albistur, in January, gave Milei the nickname “Holy Week” in front of the media, because “it is not known if it falls in March or April.” The businessman who created so many symbols of Kirchnerist “popular nationalism” recommended that the Kirchnerist militants “buy a lot of popcorn” to enjoy watching the libertarian president fall: “don’t let him catch you without popcorn,” said the “nac&pop publicist” from his home in the charming beaches of Cariló.

But in the days before Holy Week, the “national and popular” survey by Analogies may have made advertising man K choke on his own popcorn with the unusual recovery of the libertarian image in full economic adjustment.

For the Peronists in Congress, Milei represents another dilemma: they stopped his Bases law, nicknamed “Omnibus,” with more than 600 laws that were going to facilitate the economic transformation that the President seeks.

Unionism successfully went to court to stop the transcendental labor chapter of the mega-DNU of more than 300 decrees and repeals with which the economist started: they thus denied him all the relevant microeconomic reforms with which Milei aimed to generate work and attract investments. Milei could only resort to the most orthodox and ruthless macroeconomic adjustment of public spending, or “Chainsaw Plan” to compensate for the lack of “micro” structural reforms: it was what was at hand.

Milei rejected any suggestion of organizing a coalition or alliance with Together for Change – when they were still together – so it was easier for Peronism to win the fight in Congress.

But – for now – the bet on overturning Milei’s image due to the «savage adjustment» without structural reforms that compensate for the bad moment with investments is not going well for the opposition: the San Andrés survey shows that in March the President also He once again placed himself at the head of the evolution that this university periodically follows: together with the “vice” Victoria Villarruel and the Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, They are 12 points ahead of the second, the former governor of Cordoba Juan Schiaretti. The others: Macri, Massa, Cristina Kirchner, Alberto Fernández and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, run from behind in a platoon that goes from 30 percent down in the image «table.»

Read also: The IMF’s concerns about Argentina: it fears the social and political limit of adjustment

Another classic fact from San Andrés that shows that Milei is covered with a kind of “layer of asbestos” with which it does not burn with the Argentine economic disaster is “Satisfaction with the general progress of things.” This is an indicator typical of the public opinion research team of that university led by Professor Diego Reynoso and which seeks to synthesize the general social mood of the country. It has been measuring it regularly since January 2016, with the start of Mauricio Macri’s presidency.

Milei is still far from the “satisfaction” that there was in public opinion with the engineer’s start (it averaged 45 percent) or with the start of the pandemic, which generated a fleeting blow of confidence for Alberto Fernández with a peak of more of 50 percent.

But The Satisfaction curve of the Milei era is rising from the “underground” of 10 percent where Fernández left it and marked 32 percent in March.

To paraphrase the advertising man Albistur: the surveys are indicating that, for now, the popcorn will have to wait.