Medievalism and right-wing propaganda in Argentina: Fernando A. Iglesias’s El Medioevo Peronista y la Llegada de la Peste

JUAN MANUEL LACALLE; KARINA FERNÁNDEZ

Congreso; XXXVIII International Congress for the Study of Medievalism ?The Medieval in Cyberspace?; 2023

International Society for the Study of Medievalism

In August 2023, Javier Milei, a far-right candidate, won the primary elections for the presidency of Argentina. In his speeches, he launched an attack directed at public education as a whole and to the universities and investigations centers. Milei’s discourse follows years of aggressions on humanities and social sciences’ researchers and scholars. One particular strategy deployed in these criticisms ties the work of researchers to the peronist governments, in order to accuse them of “living off the State”. In this context, we consider the critical work carried out by the humanities more relevant thanever, particularly medievalism in its evidencing the ideological constructions that manipulate the medieval imaginary. One such critic of the way the state functions in Argentina is the right-wing congressman of the “Juntos por el Cambio” party, Fernando Adolfo Iglesias.In his essay El Medioevo Peronista y la llegada de la peste (2020) [The Medieval Peronism and the arrival of the plague], he makes use of medieval imagery to denigrate a political movement and an ideological profile of the Argentine politics historically linked to variants of the peronist movement and, in its present form, the kirchnerism. Within the framework of a medievalist approach, we identify different uses of the Middle Ages on the basis of a typology divided into seven points: comparisons with medieval spaces or actors; circular temporality; the concept of terre gaste; the union between the Church and the army; feudalism as a regime for the power management and the generation of vassal ties of dependence; the supposed link between the medieval and fanaticism; the construction of a legendary epic. The analysis of these uses can help us comprehend how the negative view of the medieval elements, and the particular forms they take within the Latin American context (which differs, for example, from the uses pointed out by Wollenberg [2018] or Kotkin [2020]), has as it ultimate objective the undermining of the authority and capability, in this case, of the Argentine State.