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The mainstream conservative candidate in Argentina’s presidential election wants to rethink her nation’s relationship with China, scrap entry into the Brics bloc, probe billions of dollars of recent state loans and prevent Beijing from dominating key sectors of the economy.
Patricia Bullrich, who is locked in a three-way fight for the presidency with a hard-right libertarian outsider and the candidate of the incumbent Peronists, told the Financial Times she wanted to keep China as a key trading partner but “we are not going to surrender our sovereignty”.
“We believe that in some of the latest [Chinese] loans there are clauses which we don’t know about and we are ready to re-examine them,” she said in an interview at her Buenos Aires apartment. “We don’t want Chinese infrastructure for the management of [Argentine territory in] Antarctica . . . we would not give all the 5G [networks] to Chinese companies.”
The Peronist government has agreed a $19bn swap line with Beijing and negotiated Argentina’s entry into the Belt and Road infrastructure-building initiative, with billions of dollars of Chinese state-backed loans agreed in recent years. President Alberto Fernández will travel to China this week to seek to use another $5bn of the swap, according to local news reports.
The Brics grouping — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — dominated by China, announced in August a six-country expansion to include Argentina, but Bullrich, a former security minister, said she would not allow her country to join the bloc.
“We don’t agree with being partners with Iran [or] Russia,” Bullrich said as she sipped traditional yerba maté tea from a gourd inscribed “Patricia Bullrich Presidente”.
The latest polls ahead of the October 22 presidential and congressional elections show Bullrich’s Juntos por el Cambio (JxC) bloc trailing 10 percentage points behind radical economist Javier Milei and likely to lose the second place in a probable run-off election to the Peronist economy minister Sergio Massa. However, experts are unsure of the accuracy of the surveys in a volatile political climate.
Bullrich, 67, has been criticised for running a lacklustre campaign, focused on attacking the Peronists and emphasising tough law and order policies rather than targeting Milei, whose insurgent campaign has thrived on social media and excited Argentina’s disaffected youth.
In August’s nationwide primaries, where all voters must cast ballots, her personal vote of 17 per cent was little more than half Milei’s 30 per cent and trailed that of Massa, who secured 21 per cent despite presiding over triple-digital annual inflation.
However, the total vote for each of the three main political movements was relatively close. Bullrich insisted that JxC would recover strongly in next Sunday’s election as voters realised the risks of Milei’s radical proposals, which included closing the central bank and dollarising the ailing economy to tame inflation — currently at 138 per cent.
“There has been a change in many people who saw in Milei the idea of breaking everything and starting again from scratch,” she said. “When they see that . . . he is coming to burn the house down, they say: ‘No, stop! I wanted change, but don’t burn my house down’.”
Bullrich was scathing about Milei’s flagship dollarisation proposal, saying it would create a straitjacket from which it would be impossible to escape. She recalled the crippling recession Greece suffered as a member of the euro bloc.
“No Argentina businessman wants to dollarise because he knows that he won’t be competitive,” she said. “It’s like Greece in relation to Germany with the euro.”
Her proposals include balancing the budget by cutting spending, a new charter for the central bank to prevent it from printing money to fund deficits and a dual currency system in which both the dollar and the peso would be accepted in contracts.
“It’s the same thing which exists today in Argentina, but made legal,” said Carlos Melconian, her candidate for economy minister. “Today in Argentina you have savings in dollars and transactions in pesos but it’s not legal. You can’t have contracts in dollars or invoice in dollars. By modifying the civil code, you will be able to.”
Many analysts believe that the Herculean challenges facing Argentina’s next president will require a national unity government. Bullrich has just announced a last-minute alliance with her erstwhile centrist rival for the JxC presidential nomination, Horacio Larreta. But she scorned the idea of negotiating with the Peronists, who have dominated government since Argentina returned to democracy in 1983.
“I am not going to negotiate with the mafiosos putting a gun to my head,” she said. “The only thing they care about is their own power”. Instead, she emphasised the need to restore order to a troubled and divided country.
“Argentina is in chaos,” she said, adding that the country needed “order for the economy, order for security, order for education . . . an orderly country, a predictable country, not the disaster which we are experiencing now”.
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