Messi helps a nation feel better

Agile. Versatile. Glorious. Playmaker. Extraordinary. Finessing. Sumptuous. Gumption. Nail-biting. Magician. Fireworks. Exploded. Acts of alchemy.

These are just some of the words and phrases an excited press corps has vigorously employed to describe the football World Cup final between France and Argentina — and the star Argentine player, Lionel Messi — in Doha, Qatar.

Other words making it to the pages include grisly, dark arts, pièce de résistance (fine as long as you’re not a French player or citizen), tension, despair and suffered — another word that was purloined, just like the World Cup, from the French.

Those last words could as easily refer to Argentina’s economy over the past two decades as to the Scaloni bus rattling to victory in the Lusail Stadium on Sunday night.

Inflation is running at 92% in Argentina. The country’s popular vice-president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has been sentenced to six years in jail for defrauding the state in public works contracts worth $1bn. The peso has declined 75% in value against the dollar in the past three years, and 37% of the population live below the poverty line, according to The Economist. 

And there, coming up in the middle, is Argentina’s monstrous fiscal deficit, running faster than Lionel Messi with a football at his feet.

The country has a $44bn bailout from the International Monetary Fund to shore up the peso, but the fund in turn demands much tighter monetary policy, which  the government has failed to implement.

That it has failed to do so is largely because it, like its various predecessors, has been unable to wean itself off social welfare largesse — or “Peronism”, to use its better-known moniker —  such as hefty subsidies for electricity and transport, which are great for the people but cannot be paid for by printing more money.

Sunday was a respite, then, for Argentina. Thousands surged to the Obelisk in central Buenos Aires, braaied, honked car hooters, partied, drank and cried rivers of joy, which helped take their minds off the perilous state of the nation.

For tomorrow is another day and maybe even another government. Today, though, it is simply just Messi.