ARGENTINA-POLITCS: Election Spotlight on Women

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 21 1997 (IPS) - Two women hold centre stage at Argentina’s legislative elections Sunday (Oct 26) and the outcome could well have a bearing on the 1999 presidential race.

Hilda Gonzalez, wife of Peronist governor Eduardo Duhaldo, is competing in Buenos Aires province – the country’s largest district – for a seat in Congress. Her husband has admitted his own political career may depend on her success.

Gonzalez presently enjoys tremendous popularity among voters in Buenos Aires as director of a charity programme in the province that supplies aid to 600,000 people, but she is practically unknown in the rest of the country.

Her opponent is Senator Graciela Fernandez Meijide who heads the list of candidates for legislatures of the alliance between the Radical Civic Union (UCR) and the Front for a Country in Solidarity (FREPASO). Fernandez does not hide her ambition to succeed president Carlos Menem in 1999 and Eduardo Duhalde also is a likely candidate at the party primaries next year.

Buenos Aires province is home to nine million of the 22 million registered voters in Argentina – nearly 40 percent of the total electorate. Pollsters agree that both candidates are currently running neck and neck, making it impossible to make any sure prediction of the outcome of voting.

Voters Sunday will choose 130 new members of the 257 seat Congress. The governing party currently has 131 legislators seats overall but its current majority could be affected when results are in.

Latest polls show that 90 percent of voters in Buenos Aires percent are split evenly between choosing Gonzalez or Fernandez. Due to her social aid program, the poor and needy sectors of the voting population are solidly behind Gonzalez, while Fernandez has support among the middle and upper classes.

According to a survey conducted by the Center for the Study of the New Majority, Gonzalez has 74 percent of the votes among the poorest sectors, while 59 percent of the middle class supports Fernandez. Each candidate is trying to make inroads into the other’s social base in order to break the tie.

Milk, eggs and cereals have been the recipe for the success of Hilda Gonzalez – known as “Chiche.” These food staples – paid for by the government – are distributed daily by some 25,000 female volunteers in the province’s poorest neighborhoods.

Critics say that Chiche’s humanitarian work garners nearly half the 600 million dollars assigned annually for aid programmes in Buenos Aires, and it is covering up the deficiencies of the government’s economic policies, which has generated high levels of unemployment and poverty.

Keeping a low profile, the governor’s wife has declined to participate in political debates. She also has confessed that she is uninterested in legislative work – which she would delegate to her aids – and prefers social work, following closely her province’s programs.

Chiche has no political experience, except the fact that she us married to Duhalde. She is a schoolteacher, raised five children, and has worked “helping out” her husband, the governor of the most important province in the country. He has been re-elected once, and now aspires to the Peronist candidacy for President.

Fernandez, on the other hand, is a former French teacher who was catapulted into politics as a human rights activist when one of her sons “disappeared” during the military dictatorship of 1976- 1983. Her husband is an architect and poet and is not interested in politics.

A sociologist Cecilia Lipsyck, who is a specialist on women’s issues, believes the two candidates have marked similarities – and differences.

“Neither is viewed as coming out of the party bureaucracy, but rather from the social arena; they are not contaminated by corruption; they are sensitive and pragmatic, ” She says.

However, Hilda Gonzalez Duhalde’s power derives from that of her husband and charity network “tends to reinforce the traditional role of women as care givers, housewives who are responsible for the health of the family…” Lipsyck opines.

Fernandez, however, has “an image of the modern woman, with her own power, who rejects charity and has a great ability to communicate, an important factor in this era in which the media has displaced political parties as the main arenas for debate”, she adds.

Each volunteer “manzanera” that works for Chiche controls four blocks. If there are poor children, their mothers receive basic foods; if there are pregnant women, they provide pre-natal care; and if there are unemployed, they “let Chiche know.”

Even with all their differences, both women coincide on several issues regarding women. Both are in favor of birth control, and the “right to choose” although Fernandez has accused Gonzalez of taking positions that are not reflected in her practice.

On the issue of divorce, their positions differ. Fernandez is in favor of of the divorce law, approved in Argentina 10 years ago. Gonzalez Duhalde rejects it for personal reasons: her parents separated when she was 15, and her father abandoned her.

The two women are poised for the final stretch in one of Argentina’s historic election battles where women as protagonists is not out of the political necessity of fulling the countries gender quotas law on candidates. This time, male politicians are in the background.