Peronist’s Style Won the Presidency; Now Argentina Awaits Specifics

To his most ardent critics in Argentina, Peronist candidate Carlos Saul Menem was a Pied Piper offering vague promises and preying on the desperation of a people facing social and economic ruin.

Yet in the week since he won the presidency with an enticing mixture of charisma and fervor, even skeptics admit that Menem has earned a rare degree of public good will in a fractious, jaded country.

Although under Argentina’s constitution he won’t take office for seven months, Menem now faces fierce pressure to explain not only his vision for the country, but also how he plans to achieve it.

Referring to his campaign slogan, “Follow Me,” many are asking: Where to?

Menem has stressed that President Raul Alfonsin of the Radical Civic Union is in charge until his term ends Dec. 10. And although the two parties are holding talks, Menem is determined not to be tainted by Radical party failings--which, everyone agrees, ensured his election.

But even some of Menem’s sympathizers have questioned his largely hands-off approach. The financial markets are in a shambles, with people worried about the long lame-duck transition and awaiting signals that Menem will prove as capable at administering a decaying bureaucracy as he was at winning votes.

In the first five days after his landslide victory, the dollar rose by 64% against the austral, the Argentine currency, further unhinging an inflation rate that stands at nearly 50% this month--more than 8,000% annually. Some shortages are occurring, the nation is $3 billion in arrears on its foreign debt, and even 100% monthly interest rates cannot keep nervous Argentines from fleeing into dollars.

Those are some of the overwhelming problems that will confront this son of Syrian immigrants, an outsider who rose from governor of the northwestern province of La Rioja to conquer his party and then the country, wearing the mantle of Peronist party founder Juan D. Peron.

Slightly built but a healthy athlete--he played an hourlong soccer game on election eve--Menem showed enormous energy in the campaign, crisscrossing the country in his “Mememobile” high-tech bus.

He both invoked Peron’s memory and stressed the changes in Peronism since the autocratic general founded the party in the mid-1940s. Menem was among those who pushed for reforms in the Justicialist Party, as Peronism is formally called, after Alfonsin’s victory in 1983.

As the party’s vice president, he helped democratize the internal structures with changes such as the party’s first presidential primary last July, and went on to beat the favorite, powerful Buenos Aires Province Gov. Antonio Cafiero, the party president.

An amateur race car driver and private pilot, the 58-year-old lawyer was often on the cover of gossip magazines, photographed with starlets. But having spent five years in custody without charge during the last military dictatorship, he also was committed to restoring the party to its former status as the dominating force in Argentine political life.

His long hair and bushy sideburns, the trademark symbol of his role model, 19th-Century caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga, seem to have been slowly trimmed in recent weeks, making him look more presidential.

Trading his leather jacket for well-tailored dark suits, Menem was conciliatory and calm last week, appealing for unity and cooperation. His striking wife, Zulema, spoke of continuing the work of Peron’s legendary second wife, Evita, who remains an inspiration for millions of working-class Argentines.

Both were born Muslim, but he converted to Roman Catholicism (Argentina’s constitution requires the president to be Catholic). They have two teen-age children. The couple ended a separation before he launched his campaign.

Smiling and soft-spoken, the president-elect charmed a national television audience in a lengthy interview.

He chose not to gloat over his 49% to 37% trouncing of the ruling Radical party candidate, Cordoba Province Gov. Eduardo Cesar Angeloz, in a sometimes nastily negative campaign. “I have defeated an adversary, but I have regained a friend,” he said on election night after an amicable, televised phone chat with Angeloz.

Yet Menem also reacted testily at times to criticism of his appearance and his party, saying its critics were judging the past, not the present. He asked at one point why it was noteworthy that he sometimes wore white shoes with summer outfits and why he is called a populist, with its undertones of magic solutions.

“You have a deaf ear, you have never understood what Justicialism is, you have begun from false concepts, from preconceptions . . . on the basis of lack of understanding and many times on the basis of lies,” he told one reporter.

“Here, there is no other party as democratic as the Justicialist Party. It maintains its ideals, and it has evolved its doctrines, modernizing itself in accord with prevailing circumstances,” Menem added.

Angeloz’ campaign ads had tried to portray Menem as a throwback to the old Peronism, resurrecting images of Peron’s conflict with the church, the military and business leaders that led to a coup against him in 1955 and, in 1976, against his third wife, Maria Estela Peron.

Jose Rodriguez, a Peronist congressman considered a likely minister of labor, said that Menem was best situated to attack the economic crisis because he could count on the support of the Peronist labor unions, which tangled constantly with the Radical government, waging 13 general strikes.

“The expectations (among workers) will be very big, but they will be controllable,” Rodriguez said. “People want the chance to work. We have learned since 1975,” when the unions demanded huge wage hikes from the Peronist government, fueling social chaos that led to the coup.

A foreign diplomat noted that cutting the inflation-causing government budget deficit is going to prove painful, especially for a Peronist party built on labor support. While Menem attracted new industry to La Rioja during his three terms as governor, he also sharply increased the number of public workers, and issued local bonds as a sort of currency to cover deficits.

Still, the diplomat added, “Menem has an extraordinary ability to reach out to his adversaries and put his arm around them and try to draw them in . . . and he really believes he owes no political debts, not even to the unions.”

Menem made a dramatic arrival at a victory barbecue Tuesday at a huge ranch 50 miles outside Buenos Aires, landing in a convoy of five helicopters. Then there was an hour of chaos, as his staffers realized they were unprepared for the planned news conference for 170 foreign reporters.

Menem sketched his proposals for pacts with business, labor and the near-bankrupt provinces and declared: “Those who see abstraction in our plans are absolutely mistaken. . . . We are not for or anti-privatization; we are neither pro-state nor anti. We are completely pragmatic.”

Asked if he would change his life style, Menem replied: “The way I am now got me to the presidency. I have no reason to change it.”