It’s hot and I’m tired. It’s a fair sign that things are getting close to a limit when you find yourself looking forward to a new episode of traffic cops for mindless entertainment. (Note to the controller of the BBC; stop blocking proxy servers, and charge your overseas viewers a licence fee instead; we’d happily pay you if you’d agree to take our money. You know it makes sense.)
When I first started writing a blog, the idea was to make it bilingual. Then I ran out of oomph to keep up with the translating, so it went English for a few years. Then I started posting links to it on Facebook, which means that we have come back full circle, thanks to automatic, albeit not technically brilliant, translations.
In case the BBC didn’t get round to mentioning it, the first round of last weekend’s presidential elections was won by the pro-Kirchner (i.e. friend of the current president) candidate Scioli, but not by a big enough margin, so we are gearing up for a second round. The political map so far shows the provinces of the far north and south as mono-coloured pro-government, while the middle of the country is a mish-mash of different colours for various opposition parties. So I guess what could usefully happen next is for the opposition parties to unite behind the one candidate. Here in San Francisco the biggest opposition candidate Macri won a comfortable victory, while Scioli trailed in third. I don’t understand enough about Argentinean politics to provide much in-depth analysis but here are a couple of things that folk are passing around on facebook at the moment;
(In English; Scioli being the puppet, “I am going to be president with faith, with hope, with optimism, with sport, with tourism, with joy… and with more independence than ever”).
Or this one, on the difficulties of presenting a political agenda when your predecessor has spent the previous years trying to convince the electorate that there are no problems left to solve;
(In English; Great program of D. Scioli; I am going to reduce the inflation that doesn’t exist, pay the foreign debt that we don’t have, and combat the poverty that isn’t there).
The other rumour passing around is that if Scioli wins, he will shortly be assassinated by his own party in order to be replaced by one Anibal Fernandez who is generally held to be a Lewd Fellow of the Baser Sort. I honestly couldn’t begin to pretend to unravel that as a conspiracy theory, but just in case, remember, you heard it here first.