Economy priority for Menem

Press, 19 May 1989, Page 6

Economy priority for Menem

NZPA-Reuterßuenos Aires Argentina’s Presidentelect, Carlos Menem, who will face crippling inflation, a depleted treasury and a crushing foreign debt when he takes office in December, says the economy will be his top priority in transition talks with the ruling Radical Party.

Mr Menem and President Raul Alfonsin will meet today to discuss an economic package to see the country through to the hand-over of power. Questions persist as to how the Radicals and Mr Menem’s Peronists will address the economic crisis and other political problems until Mr Alfonsin’s six-year term ends

on December 10. Mr Menem will have to grapple with a virtually bankrupt Government, a currency that has lost more than half its value against the dollar in the last six weeks, and inflation running at an annual rate of 600 per cent.

“The issue I am most interested in discussing with Alfonsin is the economy,” Mr Menem told reporters yesterday. Mr Menem, who beat a Radical contender, Eduardo Angeloz, by a crushing 12 per cent margin in the polls, still has to define clearly the steps he intends to take to cure Argentina’s economic crisis, businesspeople and politicians say.

“There are at least 10 different plans to take on the economic crisis,” a Peronist economist told reporters, “but Menem is a man from the provinces and he will take his time to make a decision.”

Up to now the "productive revolution,” a slogan for his proposal to boost output and consumption by granting universal wage increases and easy credit, seemed to summarise Mr Menem’s economic programme. Mr Alfonsin said in an interview published yesterday that he was “mortified” by the economic crisis and had hoped it could have been brought under control before the election.