ELECTIONS-ARGENTINA: Runoff Likely to Offer Only Right-Wing

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Apr 23 2003 (IPS) - The rise in popularity of presidential candidate Ricardo López Murphy and the comeback staged by former president Carlos Menem could mean that two right- wing candidates will take the lead in Sunday’s elections in Argentina and face off in a second round on May 18.

Ten months ago, López Murphy, a prominent economist and former government minister, had opinion poll ratings of just two percent. Today, several analysts have ventured to predict that he and Menem (1989-1999) of the governing Justicialista (Peronist) Party will make it to the runoff.

”It’s strange, but López Murphy’s campaign has been strong compared to those of his competitors,” political analyst Marcos Novaro told IPS. ”He was able to get voters to identify him as a non-traditional leader who would bring about change. The problem is that those expectations are going to be frustrated if he wins.”

Novaro, a professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, described López Murphy as a right-wing candidate who instead of focusing exclusively on the need for orthodox structural adjustment measures has chosen to tout himself as an anti-corruption candidate with ”common sense” and a realistic platform – by contrast to Menem’s promises to eradicate extreme poverty in the short-term and achieve what many observers say are unrealistic economic growth rates.

One of López Murphy’s campaign spots says ”I am the bleach” – a reference to his pledge to sweep away corruption.

Until not long ago, López Murphy belonged to one of the two traditional parties, the Radical Civic Union (UCR). He sat on the cabinet of former president Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001), who was forced out of office by protests and rioting in December 2001.

López Murphy served 18 months as defence minister, and later spent just 15 days in the economy ministry, where he attempted to implement a fiscal adjustment programme that ran up against insurmountable popular opposition.

But curiously, the outright economic and financial collapse that occurred shortly after his stint in the economy ministry seems to have played in his favour. Many voters now say they believe that the stringent adjustment measures he tried to adopt could have averted the disaster.

After López Murphy left the UCR, he founded the centre-right Federal Recreate Movement, and as his campaign began to focus on drawing the middle-class vote with a platform based on ”honesty and common sense,” his ratings grew steadily from two percent to the current 20 percent.

He is now one of the four candidates with a clear shot at making it to the second round of elections.

López Murphy’s prospects have been boosted by the fact that the Justicialista Party failed to reach agreement on a single candidate, and has fielded three, and that the UCR has been virtually destroyed.

But none of the four front-runners – the three Peronists and López Murphy – is in a position to score an outright victory on Sunday.

In order to avoid a runoff, the winning candidate must take 45 percent of the vote, or 40 percent with a 10-point lead on the closest rival.

The big question mark is which two candidates will fight it out on May 18.

The Peronists with the strongest chances are Menem, the governor of Santa Cruz province Néstor Kirchner, and the former governor of the province of San Luis, Adolfo Rodríguez Saá, who spent a few days as caretaker president after de la Rúa resigned before he himself was toppled.

According to the latest polls, López Murphy has left Rodríguez Saá behind, enjoys a slight advantage over Kirchner, and even beat Menem in some surveys.

Jorge Giacobbe, a pollster, found that Menem has 22.4 percent ratings, López Murphy 20.1 percent, and Kirchner 19 percent.

In such a fragmented panorama, compounded by the fact that more than 20 candidates are running for the presidency, the share of votes that the leading contenders will take is sure to be small, but will guarantee them a spot in the second round, said Giacobbe.

His prediction for the runoff? That López Murphy would beat Menem, garnering around 57 percent of the vote.

And if the race were between Menem and Kirchner, he believes the latter would win, due to the large number of voters who say they would never support Menem, who left office amidst accusations of corruption and cronyism and later spent six months under house arrest in connection with an arms trafficking scandal.

Many voices also blame him for laying the groundwork for the current crisis, the worst in Argentina’s modern history.

A survey carried out this week by pollster Eduardo Fidanza indicated that Menem would win the first round with 18.1 percent of the vote, followed by López Murphy with 17.5 percent, and Kirchner with 16.5 percent.

But observers caution that the top contestants are neck and neck, which makes a sure forecast impossible.

”The electorate sees López Murphy as a candidate with some virtues, who doesn’t care so much about ideologies,” said Fidanza. ”He is even seen as acceptable by some progressives, who regard him as a candidate who goes against the traditional politicians.”

Although the analyst sees both Menem and López Murphy as right- wing candidates, he said each will appeal to a very different kind of voter.

Menem, he explained, maintains a support base among the poor, who remember his first term, in the early 1990s, when four-digit runaway inflation was tamed, and there were plenty of opportunities to make a living in the informal sector, even if jobs were lost in the formal economy.

”It is a cynical vote, because it will come from those who say: ‘it’s true, Menem was corrupt, but at least we were living well under him. The others are corrupt too, and on top of that they would make our lives difficult’,” said Fidanza.

López Murphy’s voters, meanwhile, will likely come from the middle- and upper-middle class and the wealthy.

Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna, who backs Kirchner, agreed with the description of Menem and López Murphy as rightists, even if they attempt to depict themselves as centre-right.

Both candidates are ”very close to the world of finance,” not to the sphere of businesses involved in production, which must create jobs that the country so desperately needs, he said.

Unemployment has climbed to more than 21 percent, and a similar proportion of the population is under-employed, while 57 percent of the country’s 37 million people have plunged into poverty, according to official figures.

In a survey conducted this week on the web site of the Buenos Aires daily La Nación, 42 percent of respondents said López Murphy’s rise was due to ”the public’s lack of confidence in his competitors,” rather than to his own virtues.

For his part, Novaro said the campaigns of Kirchner and once- popular centre-left lawmaker Elisa Carrió were ”a fiasco,” which reduced, rather than increased, their support.

Carrió, who like López Murphy is a UCR defector, has sunk to fifth in the polls.

”It is not that the electorate is inclined towards proposals from the right, but that the alternatives for change in this campaign were not represented by progressive candidates, but were well expressed instead by figures who are not progressive, like Menem and López Murphy,” said Novaro.

But after one of them wins, ”the challenge will be how to transform that electoral support into agreements on policy and measures, in order to enable the new president to govern with the adequate support. That is where the fear arises that the expectations of voters will be frustrated,” he added.