ELECTIONS-ARGENTINA: Kirchner Passes First Test with Flying Colours

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 24 2005 (IPS) - In the first legislative elections since he took office, Argentine President Néstor Kirchner saw his support base grow, and has largely taken the helm of the Peronist party, dealing a defeat to its conservative leaders.

But although the results will provide smoother sailing for Kirchner -who had won the 2003 elections with a mere 22 percent of the vote – he will still lack the majority needed in the lower house to push through bills without having to strike deals with rival Peronist factions or the opposition.

Cabinet chief Alberto Fernández said Monday that the outcome amounted to “virtually a referendum” on the government’s performance so far.

The most impressive victory was enjoyed by the president’s wife, first lady Cristina Fernández, who held onto her seat in the Senate, but representing the province of Buenos Aires – home to nearly 40 percent of the country’s voters – instead of the southern province of Santa Cruz.

With 99 percent of the voting stations counted, Senator Fernández had taken 46 percent of the provincial vote at the head of Kirchner’s Front for Victory Peronist faction.

She was 26 points ahead of her arch-rival, Hilda “Chiche” González, the wife of former president Eduardo Duhalde (2002-2003), who led the slate that carried the official Justicialista (Peronist) Party seal.

“There are no stunning personal, individual victories,” said Fernández after her triumph. “Voters have declared their support for a vision of a country that is beginning to change the lives of the Argentine people,” she added, referring to the government’s policies and the centre-left approach taken by the Peronist faction led by her husband.

No one doubts, however, that after her landslide victory in what has been Duhalde’s stronghold for years, Fernández is shaping up as an important leader on the national political scene.

Her victory also gave a heavy blow to Duhalde’s conservative Peronist faction. His wife won just 19.7 percent of the vote, even though she had the backing of a right-wing party that according to analysts accounted for nearly five percent of the vote.

Kirchner’s allies garnered around 40 percent of the vote nationwide.

Observers also said Monday that the outcome indicated voters’ support for Kirchner’s tacit proposal to transform the Peronist party into a centre-left coalition.

By the 2003 presidential elections, Kirchner and Fernández – who first became politically active in the leftist Peronist Youth in the 1970s in La Plata, the capital of the eastern province of Buenos Aires – were already at loggerheads with the Peronist leadership that led the party towards the centre-right in the 1990s during the term of former president Carlos Menem (1989-1999).

Today, and with the same slate as in 2003 – Front for Victory -the Kirchner camp not only beat out Duhalde, the president’s main rival in the Peronist party, but also Menem, who won a Senate seat for the northern province of La Rioja (which accounts for 0.8 percent of the country’s voters).

But although Menem gained his seat, he actually lost. Governor Angel Mazza, representing the Front for Victory, garnered 51 percent of the vote compared to Menem’s 40.6 percent.

Like Menem and Duhalde, other conservative and centre-right Peronist leaders who traditionally enjoyed strong support in their provinces were defeated Sunday.

In the meantime, a new centre-right leader, businessman Mauricio Macri, soundly won in the city of Buenos Aires with nearly 34 percent of the vote. His faction seized six of the 13 Chamber of Deputies seats at stake in the capital.

“The democratic system needs an alternative,” said Macri, adding that he had in mind a national opposition coalition with other centre-right groupings.

The job will not be easy for Macri, who is also president of the world famous Boca Juniors football club. His leading partner, economist Ricardo López Murphy, came in fifth in the province of Buenos Aires, with just 7.7 percent of the vote.

Macri may join up with the conservative Peronists led by Duhalde and other rightist provincial leaders like Governor Jorge Sobisch in southern Neuquén, who won by a broad margin in his district.

Elisa Carrió, the candidate for the centre-left Alternative for a Republic of Equals, who up to just a few weeks ago was the front-runner in the city of Buenos Aires, was left in second place, with 21.8 percent of the vote, followed by Kirchner’s Foreign Minister Rafael Bielsa, with 20 percent.

People close to the president said that despite the fact that Bielsa came in third, Macri’s ascent could serve the new political system that the government wants to create, and which began to take shape on Sunday: Kirchner and his followers at the core of a centre-left alliance facing off with a coalition of right-wing and centre-right parties.

The centre-left parties that did not ally themselves with Kirchner in the mid-term elections are divided and do not offer a well-defined alternative.

The big triumph on the left went to Socialist Hermes Binner, at the head of a list that took five of the nine seats in the Chamber of Deputies for the eastern province of Santa Fe.

Binner gets on well with Kirchner, while Carrió, a government critic, did not do as well as expected.

Sunday’s victory gave Kirchner a majority in the Senate, where the share of seats held by his allies rose from 38 to 43 out of a total of 72. But in the lower house, he will still have to negotiate support, having gone from 88 to 107 seats out of 257.

The share of the Chamber of Deputies controlled by the Duhalde camp, meanwhile, shrank from 36 to 28.

The Radical Civic Union (UCR), Argentina’s other traditional party along with the Peronists, continued its decline. Its candidates took a mere 2.2 percent of the votes in the city of Buenos Aires and 7.8 percent in the province of Buenos Aires.