The challenge of building legitimacy

While much of the public debate continues to revolve around perceptions, scandals or conjunctural tensions, there is one fact that messes up the board. Poverty is falling, not marginally but significantly. At the same time, inflation is falling and the State stops spending what it doesn't have. For the first time in a long time, the economic program shows measurable results. However, something doesn't fit. This improvement in the indicators does not translate linearly into political support. The presidential image fluctuates, unrest persists in part of the population and the opposition does not retreat. The question, then, is not economic. It's political.

No order can be sustained by results alone. It is held when individuals come to consider it legitimate. Economics can order variables, but it doesn't explain why people accept—or reject—that order based on their own assessments. This terrain is not technical, it is ideological. For years, Argentine politics operated under a familiar logic: expanding spending, sustaining artificial consumption and financing the imbalance with inflation. That model not only organized the economy, it also offered a narrative that made it tolerable for millions of people. The cost didn't go away; it was hidden, it was deferred, it was liquefied. Plunder did not cease to exist, it simply became less visible to those

who suffered it.

The current program breaks with that logic. Order, crop, delete privileges. But in doing so, it also breaks something deeper: the belief system that justified that scheme in the minds of many individuals. And that's where the real conflict comes in. It's not that there's a lack of communication. The thing is that, when the narrative that legitimized disorder breaks down, what is exposed is the very nature of the system. The tension is not between data and collective perception. It is between an order that begins to show results and another that loses the ability to be justified in individual terms

.

In this context, each economic variable competes with a personal interpretation. The increase in fuel due to external factors has an immediate impact on the pocket of each individual and is perceived more intensely than the fall in inflation. The fall in consumption in certain groups affects specific experiences, while the reduction of aggregate poverty does not always translate into a visible improvement in everyone's daily lives. The short term outweighs the trend because each person evaluates based on their own situation. Not because the data is irrelevant, but because every economic experience is ultimately individual

.

And yet, those perceptions don't form in a vacuum. They are built, disputed and reinforced through interpretive frameworks. Media, leaders, analysts and public actors do not compete only to influence decisions, but to guide the way in which individuals interpret what is happening. It's not just policies that are being discussed. The meaning of these policies is disputed in the minds of each person.

To reduce this moment to a technical discussion—if inflation falls, if the surplus is sustained—is to stay on the surface. The deeper point is another: what interpretation can individuals adopt about what is happening. If many perceive the adjustment as immediate harm, the results lose political power. If, on the other hand, a growing proportion begins to interpret the macroeconomic order as a necessary condition for breaking out of stagnation, those same results are transformed into legitimacy

.

The economy has already started to change. What is at stake now is whether the individual criteria against which it is evaluated also change. Because, in short, no system of power is sustained only by its technical consistency. It is held when enough individuals believe that such an order is legitimate. And when that perception is broken, what goes into crisis is not an indicator. It's the order itself.