MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

“The Argentine government doesn’t understand what is going on” says former official

Alberto Fernandez is working on his own political group with disenchanted officials who collaborated with Nestor Kirchner

Former Argentine Cabinet Chief Alberto Fernández assured on Sunday today that “the Government has difficulties understanding what is going on, and gives fallacious speeches that are far from reality,” and blasted the cutback of subsidies on public services and the bill that seeks to reform the Central Bank's charter

Fernández strongly questioned the subsidy cuts to public services, the controversial transfer of the subway service management to the City of Buenos Aires and the bill seeking to reform the Central Bank’s charter.

“I am under the impression that (the Government) has difficulties understanding what is going on,” Fernández said during an interview, and even accused President Cristina Fernández administration of building “a reality covered in fallacious speeches.”

Regarding the bill that seeks to reform the Central Bank charter, which was approved in the Lower House and has yet to be debated in the Senate, Fernández rejected the notion it will end convertibility issues.

“The reform will end with fiscal rules implemented during Néstor Kirchner’s administration and allows the Government access to 50 billion pesos belonging to the Central Bank every year.”

“The Government usually accuses others of wanting to slow down the economy, but that is precisely what they did when they cut off subsidies overnight as they did,” he stressed.

The former Kirchnerite official made headlines this week when in the middle of a television interview the order came from the Argentine government to bring down the program leaving him and the interviewer in a most uncomfortable situation.

Fernandez at the moment he was taken off the air was saying that President Cristina Fernandez had lost touch with reality in reference to two media articles, which talked about ‘palatial intrigues’ and she labelled the journalists “Nazi, anti-Semitic involved in Mengele reporting”.

The major scandal not only had domestic impact but also international because the following guest of the program was a former CNN in Spanish reporter who witnessed the whole incident, and immediately reported it: “I’ve never seen anything like this”.

“It was a major political stupidity and if they thought that was the way to silence me, on the contrary it has multiplied my willingness to talk about what is really happening”, said the former cabinet minister.

However Alberto Fernandez is not without political ambitions and he is organizing a group of former Nestor Kirchner administration officials, displaced or disenchanted with the widow Cristina, and hopes to take advantage of the situation in the mid term elections of 2013 to oppose the current “national and popular project”.

Fernandez believes there is a growing political space given the repeated political and economic mistakes President Cristina Fernandez is making and the fact that the ‘traditional opposition’ failed dismally in last year’s October national election which saw Nestor Kirchner’s wife re-elected with 54% of the vote.