Radical Party of Argentina

The Radical Party of Argentina appears in the book as both the principal opposition to Juan Perón and a party that appointed the Supreme Court later targeted by Carlos Saúl Menem. Its place in that history reveals how a court intended to constrain executive power could become vulnerable to partisan control, and how that vulnerability persisted across changes of government.

Opposition to Perón

Before Perón became president, the Court ruled that his new national labor relations board was unconstitutional. Perón made the Court a target in his 1946 campaign, as Franklin D. Roosevelt had criticized the U.S. Supreme Court during his 1936 reelection campaign. After Perón’s victory, his supporters in the Chamber of Deputies proposed impeaching four of the Court’s five members. The allegations included the Court’s acceptance of the legality of the military regimes of 1930 and 1943; the latter charge was ironic because Perón had played a key role in the 1943 coup.

Nine months after impeachment proceedings began, the Chamber impeached three judges, while the fourth had already resigned; the Senate approved the motion. Perón then appointed four new justices. Their rulings helped remove constraints on his government: they upheld the conviction of Ricardo Balbín, leader of the Radical Party of Argentina, for disrespecting Perón. The episode demonstrates how attacks on judicial independence could turn opposition into a matter of personal and political risk.

Appointment and the Court

The book presents the aftermath of Perón’s court-packing as a lasting political precedent: succeeding presidents came to treat the selection of Supreme Court justices as their own prerogative. Military and civilian governments alike appointed their preferred judges, leaving a court that might have checked executive power increasingly subject to political turnover.

The Radical Party of Argentina returned to this story as the governing party that appointed the sitting Court after Argentina’s transition to democracy in 1983. When power passed democratically to Menem in 1990, there was no comparable justification for replacing that Court merely because a new government had taken office. Yet Menem had already tried, unsuccessfully, to encourage or intimidate justices into resigning. He offered Justice Carlos Fayt an ambassadorship; Fayt rebuffed him by sending a copy of his book Law and Ethics, inscribed with a warning.

Political Consequences

Within three months of taking office, Menem proposed expanding the Court from five members to nine. As with Roosevelt’s earlier proposal in the United States, one public argument was that the Court was overworked. The book places the proposal in a longer pattern: after Perón’s successful assault on judicial constraints, presidents could treat control of the Court as a routine instrument of government rather than as a breach requiring exceptional justification.

That pattern mattered beyond the fortunes of either party. The book describes Argentine politics as formally electoral but weakly pluralistic, with concentrated power and few effective restraints on presidents. In that setting, court appointments could hollow out a potential check on executive authority, while the governing political machine distributed patronage and faced little institutional resistance. The Radical Party’s role—as Perón’s opposition and later the appointing party whose justices Menem sought to replace—makes visible how fragile judicial independence remained across democratic transitions.