POLITICS-ARGENTINA: Disillusionment Leads the Polls

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 12 2001 (IPS) - “Enough reality and facts! We want promises” reads a graffito that can be seen on several walls of the Argentine capital, where scepticism is the overriding sensation with respect to Sunday’s legislative elections.

Most of those interviewed for the latest polls on the elections, in which the entire Senate and half of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies are up for grabs, said they would cast either a blank or spoiled ballot, or would simply not vote.

On Sunday, voters in this Southern Cone country will elect 127 of the 257 members of the lower house of Congress, whose four-year term will begin Dec 10, as well as the 72 members of the Senate, as established by the 1994 constitutional reform.

Up to now, Argentina’s senators have been elected by the provincial parliaments, which will also be facing full or partial renovation Sunday.

But the public’s contempt for politicians goes even farther in this first poll held since the coalition government of President Fernando de la Rúa took office in December 1999.

Many Argentinians do not even want to staff the voting stations, usually a source of pride to those who are invited. Around 50,000 of the 99,000 citizens called on to work the polling stations in the central province of Buenos Aires excused themselves for a variety of reasons.

Meanwhile, Mori, a local polling firm, found that 38 percent of those surveyed in the capital could be lumped in that new category of voters responding “no” to everything.

“I don’t want to cast a blank ballot and I don’t want to spoil my ballot, but I don’t know who to vote for. That’s why I’m thinking that maybe I won’t even turn out” for Sunday’s elections, one caller told the Mitre radio station in Buenos Aires.

In a Gallup poll, 80 percent of respondents expressed their “disenchantment” with politics.

For that reason, the candidates have resorted in the last few days of the campaign to lashing out at the option of the “negative vote” – casting a blank or spoiled ballot – rather than trying to win over the “undecideds”.

“Like you, I am also teed-off,” begins the publicity spot of one of the legislative candidates. “I know you are fed up with the politicians,” says another candidate.

Some members of the government of De la Rúa, like Labour Minister Patricia Bullrich, have even confessed that they don’t know who to vote for.

The young, who have expressed the highest degree of disillusionment with politics for at least the past decade, head the list of people consulting non-governmental organisations dedicated to providing information to the public on the electoral rules, to ask if there are any possible legal repercussions for those who cast a blank or spoiled ballot or abstain from voting.

They have also been asking whether the blank or spoiled ballots would be divvied up by the parties to help determine the percentage of seats won by each political grouping.

The sense of indifference towards politics spawned by the steep decline in living conditions suffered by a majority of Argentina’s 37 million people has given a central role to experts on election rules, whose explanations have outshadowed the debates among the candidates themselves.

The various interpretations by analysts on the effects of the “negative vote” seem to have heightened the confusion among voters, who already had scant interest in informing themselves about the candidates’ platforms and backgrounds.

The public is especially disillusioned with the Alliance of De la Rúa, who was elected on promises of pulling the economy out of recession, reducing the high unemployment rate, and governing in a more transparent manner than his predecessor Carlos Menem (1989- 99), currently under house arrest in connection with an arms trafficking scandal.

Nearly two years into De la Rúa’s term, the country is in the grip of a severe economic crisis, and unemployment continues to hover at around 16 percent of the economically active population.

The latest austerity plan aimed at overcoming the crisis entailed drastic curbs on public spending designed to eliminate the fiscal deficit, to keep the government from having to seek fresh external credit.

As part of the “zero-deficit” plan, public sector wages and pensions were slashed, as was the budget in areas like health and social programmes targetting children and low-income sectors.

A survey carried out last month by the Graciela Romer polling firm found that a mere four percent of respondents approved of De la Rúa’s performance.

Even a number of candidates running for the ruling Alliance have criticised De la Rúa and his government. They include former cabinet chief Rodolfo Terragno, who is running for the Senate in representation of the city of Buenos Aires, and who resigned from his post over discrepancies with the government’s economic policies.

The same thing occurred with the Alliance’s top candidate for the Senate for the province of Buenos Aires, former president Raúl Alfonsín (1983-89), one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Alliance – and today one of the loudest critics of the shift to the right taken by the government over the past year.

The Alliance was born in 1996 of an accord between the Radical Civic Union (UCR), one of Argentina’s traditional parties, to which De la Rúa, Alfonsín and Terragno belong, and the centre-left Front for a Country with Solidarity (FREPASO), led at the time by Carlos Alvarez, who ended up as De la Rúa’s running-mate and vice- president.

In the 1999 election campaign, the coalition pledged to uproot corruption and follow an agenda more in line with the “third way”, the new social democratic tendency spearheaded by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

But in the first few months of De la Rúa’s term, the Economy Ministry adopted a programme limited to reducing the fiscal imbalance inherited from Menem, which deepened a recession that had already dragged on for over a year.

In the midst of the economic slump and less than 10 months into De la Rúa’s term, Alvarez resigned as vice-president over the president’s failure to back his investigation into a bribery scandal in the Senate.

Alvarez’s resignation, followed by that of other FREPASO leaders, left the government without its “centre-left” wing, and the administration turned even farther to the right this year with the designation of a new economy minister, Domingo Cavallo, who held that post under Menem.

The shift in alliances within the government led to the isolation of the few FREPASO members who still held posts in the executive branch, and left the Alliance hanging by a thread. In Sunday’s elections, the coalition is participating as such in only a handful of Argentina’s voting districts.

Among the few places where the Alliance is still holding together is the city of Buenos Aires, whose Mayor Aníbal Ibarra is today one of FREPASO’s key figures.

Meanwhile, the opposition Justice (Peronist) Party, whose leadership has marked its distance from Menem, looks set to win the elections in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina’s most populous district.

Rising fastest in the opinion polls is a new party, Argentina for a Republic of Equals (ARI), a spin-off of the Alliance led by parliamentary Deputy Elisa Carrió.

Although Carrió is not running for the Senate and is still serving out her term in the lower house, her intervention in favour of her party’s candidates has made her the star of the campaign. She is also the politician enjoying the strongest credibility among the public.

The lawmaker has thus filled the vacuum left by FREPASO – and, by extension, the Alliance – as the warrior against corruption eternally on the verge of being spit out by the “political establishment,” as Alvarez was, say analysts.

Analysts suggest that Argentina’s political leaders take critical stock of their performance in the wake of Sunday’s elections, even if the large number of poll respondents who say they plan to opt for the “negative vote” do not end up doing so.