In his inauguration speech, the Peronist leader promised a “new, fraternal and caring social contract.”
Alberto Fernandez has been sworn in as president returning Argentina to the ranks of left-leaning nations at a moment of the right-wing resurgence in the Western Hemisphere.
Fernandez, a 60-year-old lawyer from the country’s center-left Peronist movement, faces the grave and immediate challenge of trying to pull Argentina from an economic crisis: The country has a 35% poverty rate and is struggling to make debt payments on time.
In an hour-long speech, he criticized rising rates of hunger and poverty and said the country needed to revive growth to escape from “virtual default” after a period of austerity under Mauricio Macri.
“We have to heal so many open wounds in our homeland,” he said in the speech in Congress after he had symbolically taken the presidential baton and sash from Macri, whose administration was hit by recession and a spiraling debt crisis.
Fernández pledged to bridge social divisions and to roll out a “massive” credit system with low rates to bolster domestic demand. “Without bread, there is no present or future. Without bread, life only suffers,” he said.
Sources: The Guardian, AP.
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