Economic Elites, Political Parties and the Electoral Arena by Felipe Monestier

Author:Felipe Monestier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031461651
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

4.5 Economic Elites and the Strategy of Politics Without Parties

Internal and external stressors operating on the conservative order triggered a process of accelerated democratization, over which economic elites and their allies in the party system had little control. Rapid expansion of citizenship, the elimination or severe limitation of mechanisms for controlling electoral mobilization, the lack of cohesion within conservative regime parties, the anti-system opposition of the UCR, and the irruption of a new type of worker mobilization—inspired by socialism and anarchism—produced the collapse of the governing party and the alliance that supported it. The electoral machinery of the PAN did not stand up the test of the first competitive elections in Argentine history, coming after 36 years of uninterrupted government, characterized by almost complete control of the machinery of a state that was richer and more powerful than ever before. The succession of defeats that began in 1916 deprived the PAN of the presidency, and thereby of control over the resources that kept it united. This made it ever more difficult for it to return to power. A deteriorating domestic and external economic situation, and consolidation of UCR hegemony, pushed some social and political sectors to seek out extra-institutional channels of opposition.26

Between 1930 and 1943 Argentina was governed by a political coalition known as the Concordancec (Concordancia), made up of conservative parties, anti-Yrigoyen factions of radicalism, and military men. In essence, this regime sought to restore the political order that had been in place between 1880 and 1916. To this end, the government’s principal tools were demobilization of popular sectors, and “patriotic fraud” to assure the triumph of ruling party candidates. The alliance of social and political forces that built the Concordance also had control of state resources, as had been the case between 1880 and 1916. These were distributed in such a way as to ensure the loyalty of each sector. From this perspective, the period can be considered as having presented a second historic opportunity for Argentine economic elites to create an electorally relevant political party of their own. This did not occur, however, and in the medium term the political regime that came about as a result of the 1930 coup reproduced the existing disconnect between economic elites and the party system (Sidicaro 2002).

Pro-coup sectors enjoyed monopoly control over state resources for over a decade, but were unable to create a competitive party with national reach. Instead, they created the National Democratic Party, Partido Demócrata Nacional, PDN. The PDN operated with the same logic as had the PAN before it. Instead of creating a nationwide organization fit for electoral competition, the PDN was little more than a space for coordination around two priorities: organizing the fraud that assured the electoral triumph of the incumbent government, and allocating public resources to segments of the economic elite and provincial political factions.

The restorationist project also faced a reality quite different from that prevailing in 1880: the country had been transformed in the interim by both domestic and external factors. Concordance-era

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