POLITICS: Argentina’s President-Elect Pledges Transparency

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 25 1999 (IPS) - President-elect of Argentina Fernando De la Rúa pledged “transparency and moral change,” and said his government would put an end to “corruption and impunity; we are going to live within the limits of the law.”

De la Rúa, 62, won Sunday’s elections with a landslide victory, garnering 48.5 percent of the vote, against the 38 percent taken by his Peronist rival Eduardo Duhalde.

The president-elect, the candidate of the opposition Alliance comprised of the centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR) and centre- left ‘Frente País Solidario’ (Frepaso), added that during his four- year term, the “moral change” would also benefit Argentina’s 13 million poor.

Thanks to De la Rúa’s smashing victory, there will be no second round of voting.

Duhalde, meanwhile, made the worst showing of any candidate in the history of the governing Justice (Peronist) Party, created by Juan Perón in 1945. Until now, the party had only been defeated once, in 1983, when Italo Luder lost to the UCR’s Raúl Alfonsín, with 41 percent of the votes.

Former economy minister Domingo Cavallo – the architect of Argentina’s currency board, which pegged the peso to the dollar and largely contributed to reigning in four-digit inflation since 1991 – took more than 10 percent of the ballots cast.

While opinion polls indicated that the result of Sunday’s presidential elections was a foregone conclusion, De la Rúa’s victory was even more impressive than expected.

For the first time in history, Argentina will be ruled by a coalition government. The UCR-Frepaso Alliance was created in 1997, and chalked up a resounding triumph in the legislative elections that same year.

De la Rúa, the mayor of the city of Buenos Aires, belongs to the UCR, and his running-mate, vice-president-elect Carlos Alvarez, to Frepaso.

Sunday’s was the fourth consecutive presidential election since democracy was restored in 1983 after seven years of a bloody de facto military regime. Never before has Argentina chosen four presidents in a row in democratic elections.

President Carlos Menem, who has governed for 10 years, continued insisting on Monday that he would have won the elections if permitted to stand for a third consecutive term.

Duhalde, who ran in the elections basically without Menem’s support, due to power struggles within the Justice Party, pinned part of the blame for his defeat on the president.

Turnout was high Sunday among the more than 24 million voters, who as well as a new president and vice-president elected six provincial governors, candidates for the national and provincial legislatures, and more than 1,000 local authorities.

The closest race was for the province of Buenos Aires, home to 14 million of Argentina’s 35 million inhabitants. But in the end, Peronist candidate Carlos Ruckauf won out over the Alliance’s Graciela Fernandez Meijide.

De la Rúa is now facing serious challenges, despite a stable economy. Analysts agree that what is needed are spending cuts, tax hikes, and a safety net for the country’s 13 million poor.

In May, unemployment and underemployment both stood at 14.5 percent, while the former has reportedly risen to 16 percent this month, according to statistics not yet officially released. Many people in the middle class became Argentina’s “new poor” over the past decade.

Sociologist Artemio López, with the polling firm Equis, said the growth of the category of the”new poor was the most novel and widely extended social phenomenon of the past 10 years.”

Poverty has been growing in Argentina since 1994, when unemployment began to climb. During Menem’s first term, the situation of the poor improved thanks to the newfound economic stability. But things soon took a turn for the worse for those living below or just above the poverty line.

The revenues taken in through privatisations were not channeled into public policies designed to address the needs of pensioners, the unemployed and other low-income sectors. In fact, the 25 billion dollars the Menem administration took in through the sales of public enterprises are all gone.

Health services, education, justice and security, which the state was to focus on once loss-making public enterprises were sold off, only declined during Menem’s second term, and remain De la Rúa’s biggest challenges.

Analysts agree that the state must expand slightly – not to compete with the private sector, but to provide more efficient protection for those who fall through the safety net.

They also say the new president must gain strict control over the new private utility companies, which raked in the profits when they received captive markets, while left free to raise the rates of public services.

Another big challenge is a foreign debt equivalent to 50 percent of the gross national product of this Southern Cone country.

But the big issue in the election campaign was preserving the stability achieved under Menem.

While the chief concern of voters from 1983 to 1991 was runaway inflation that peaked at an annual rate of over 3,000 percent, 75 percent of those who went to the polls Sunday had clear memories of runaway inflation, and feared “that a change in that sense could make things worse,” according to the polling firm Mora y Araujo.

What voters sought Sunday was change with stability.

Fed up with a steady diet of scandals and accusations of corruption, as well as the “clientilism”, lavish expenditure and pomp associated with the Menem administration, they opted for a candidate whose personality contrasts sharply with the president’s flamboyant style of parties, esthetic surgeries, fitness clubs, high fashion and the quest for eternal youth.

De la Rúa, in his dark suits and ties, is described as predictable, incapable of slipping up, serious and “boring” – attributes he turned into political capital.

Until honesty and austerity became highly prized commodities as members of Menem’s cabinet and other officials increasingly came under fire for corruption, De la Rúa was merely a mid-level UCR leader.

Convinced that the less he spoke, the better, De la Rúa avoided televised debates, and initially declined to attend talk shows and other TV programmes that could highlight his “defects” – lack of charisma, humour, and charm.

But once he understood that his blandness was one of his chief political assets, the candidate began to accept invitations, and despite the often impertinent treatment he was subjected to on entertainment shows, he never lost his composure.

With his monotonous and at times even soporific speeches, De la Rúa hypnotised rather than captured his voters.

In the past, when Argentina needed a government that got things done at any price, Menem – who issued more than 400 presidential decrees – seemed to fit the bill. And justifying their vote for a candidate who could not claim transparency among his chief qualities, Argentinians said the government “steals, but acts.”

The phrase was just one of those characterising the Menem era, used to describe administrations that undertook mega-projects – and kept the change.

During the early years of Menem’s first term – which lasted six years, before a constitutional amendment shortened the term to four years, while making reelection possible – a trade unionist close to the government became famous overnight when he said on TV that “we must stop stealing for at least two years.”

Prior to De la Rúa, another “honest” president, Arturo Illia – overthrown by the army in 1966 – was criticised as mediocre.

But De la Rúa – whose mother used to tell him “Fernando, you are very good and kind, but Jorge, your brother, is smarter” – has once again boosted the value of a clean politician.

The president-elect’s temperament is like a balm for voters who want a moderate change, which preserves Menem’s economic achievements but drives down unemployment, while uprooting corruption and frivolousness among the ruling elites.

“The party’s over!” announced De la Rúa at the close of his campaign. And, Argentinians hope, the work will now begin, when the president-elect takes office on Dec. 10.