Till death do us part? : Kirchnerism, neodevelopmentalism and the struggle for hegemony in Argentina, 2003-2015

The extended Kirchnerist decade in Argentina (2003-15) is reaching its closure, and the political transition towards a new phase of the neodevelopmentalist era has begun. This new phase will be earmarked by the heritage of Kirchnerism as a hegemonic political project and will reflect both the new policies introduced by it and the profound continuities with the neoliberal era, whose main traits were consolidated and perfected during this period (Féliz, 2012a). This transition occurs in a global and regional framework that has violently mutated in recent years since the beginning of the 2008 capitalist crisis in the centre, and the unexpected death of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez. This chapter analyzes how the era politically dominated by Kirchnerism carne to mould the constitution and crisis of neodevelopmentalism in Argentina after the downfall of neoliberal rule. In this process, popular organizations struggled to push forward the organizational momentum that was built through clashes with neoliberalism in the late 1990s. But the limits of Kirchnerism as a progressive, ‘social-democratic’ movement became evident as it could not surpass the boundaries of dependent capitalism, thus becoming a farce of its own discourse of change.Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educació