Beyond the “angry vote”. The 2001 Argentine legislative elections revisited from an analysis of the political discourses of the time

Abstract

This paper aims to revisit the 2001 mid-term elections in Argentina to debate with the reading key that has characterized them exclusively by the angry vote [voto bronca] component and that has explained this phenomenon as a result of the unanimous discontent of people [la gente] with the politicians in general. For this, we will focus on positive votes, by analysing discourses of those political leaders who turned out to be elected. We propose to recompose the polemics established in those discourses, insofar as there were multiple definitions of “crisis” in dispute there: what was on crisis, what were its causes, how to cope with it. From the gathering of a set of materials composed of opinion notes and journalistic notes in ‘Politics’ and ‘The country’ sections of the newspapers La Nación, Clarín y Página/12, we analysed a corpus comprised by those discursive pieces in which the object the crisis was thematized. Those fragments were studied from two dimensions: a) the discursive construction of the adversary/counter-addressee [contradestinatario] and b) the featuring and delimitation of the crisis as a discursive object. This analytic proposal on the October 2001 elections allows to consider an angle that has tended to be sidestepped: all discourses of the leaders who obtained the most votes tried to differentiate themselves from the government of the Alianza (even those of the candidates who were part of that coalition) and they revolve around the debate on the model change, from a domestic-market [mercadointernista] perspective. Those elections were an institutionalized deliberative scene in which a plurality of horizons was brought into play, that is to say, the organizational principles that govern collective life. The public time opened by these elections put cleavages at the centre of the public-politic scene that marked the destructuring of the fiscalist consensus and the gradual consolidation of the domestic-market one that would structure public policies since 2002.