POLITICS-ARGENTINA: Menem Pulls Out of Run-off Election

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 14 2003 (IPS) - Former Argentine president Carlos Menem formally announced Wednesday that he was withdrawing from the electoral race and would not take part in next Sunday’s run-off, prompting many observers to talk about the beginning of the decline of his lengthy political career.

After two days of uncertainty regarding his plans, Menem (1989-1999) pulled out of the elections, which he said were ”distorted from the start” by the cancellation of the internal elections of his ruling Justicialista (Peronist) Party.

The Peronists had failed to reach agreement on a single nominee, and fielded an unprecedented three candidates, including Menem and Néstor Kirchner, who was to be his rival in Sunday’s run-off, and will now become president by default.

Menem said voters would have been facing ”the false option” of choosing between two members of the same party.

In a message broadcast on Wednesday, Menem also complained of a ”smear campaign” against him, which he said forced a large number of voters to cast their ballots for ”a barely-known candidate…not out of support for his campaign proposals, but with the sole objective of keeping (his adversary) from winning.”

The latest polls showed Kirchner, the governor of the southern province of Santa Cruz, more than 40 points ahead of the corruption-tainted Menem.

This week’s ratings indicated that Kirchner would have taken between 71 and 79 percent of the vote on Sunday, and Menem from 21 to 29 percent.

Kirchner was thus about to become president with the highest level of votes in Argentine history. Instead he will take office on May 25 with the lowest vote share ever – the 22 percent he won in the first round.

Menem, 72, was three times governor of his home province, La Rioja, in northwestern Argentina before he was elected president to two consecutive terms.

In 1989 he took 47 percent of the vote. Once in office, he pushed through a constitutional amendment that made reelection possible, after which he won with nearly 52 percent support in 1995.

But since the end of his second term in 1999, when corruption scandals swirled around him, his cabinet ministers and his closest associates, and Argentina’s economy was spinning into recession, Menem’s attempts at a comeback, after he spent five months under house arrest in connection with an arms smuggling case, went over badly with the Argentine public.

Sociology professor Marcos Novaro at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences told IPS that Menem’s delay in announcing that he was quitting the race merely ”postponed the certain death” of a leader who ”couldn’t or wouldn’t find an ally to succeed him, and is thus ending his political career in disgrace.”

But Novaro, the author of the book ”Politics and Power in the Government of Menem”, agreed with the former president that the main underlying problem in the elections was the failure of the Justicialista Party to hold primaries and select a single candidate, due to the long-standing rivalry between Menem and caretaker President Eduardo Duhalde.

Political analyst Rosendo Fraga said Menem may continue to play a role as an important reference point on the national political scene, ”but not as a leader, and much less as an option” in terms of political power.

Pollster Analía del Franco put it in balder terms, saying ”there is no possible comeback from making a total fool out of yourself.”

She was referring to the effects on Menem’s political future of his behaviour in the last few days, when he repeatedly declared that he would take part in the run-off, only to drop out after two days of rumours and wavering.

Menem has thus become the first case in the world of a first-round victor to bow out of the second round of presidential elections, according to constitutionalist Daniel Sabsay.

Although the former president had garnered 24.2 percent of the vote on Apr. 27, putting him two points ahead of Kirchner, analysts said that was the absolute upper limit of the support he would be able to muster.

Minutes after his narrow triumph in April, Menem said his victory was a sure thing, and that the run-off would be merely a ”formality.” But as the final showdown approached, and opinion polls made it clear that he stood no chance of winning, the rumours that he was about to quit became louder.

Even Duhalde said over a week ago that Menem would lose ”due to desertion or knockout.” But Menem merely responded again and again that he would not abandon the fight. ”You don’t know what fibre this leader is made of,” he boasted Monday night.

Opinion polls showed that more than 50 percent of respondents said they would never vote for Menem, which analysts interpreted to mean that no matter who the former president competed against in the run-off, he would be defeated.

Menem’s support base included loyal backers of the Justicialista Party and a small segment of upper-income voters who benefited from the free market policies the former president followed in his two terms in office.

According to the polls, a majority of the population was already dead set against Menem. But on Wednesday, a survey carried out by Analía del Franco’s polling firm showed that 80 percent of respondents condemned the way he had behaved in the past two days, by keeping the country in limbo before announcing his exit.

Nevertheless, Menem said he would ”not abandon the struggle,” and that next Monday he would once again be active in politics.

He even pledged his support to the new government, advising Kirchner to urgently seek the cooperation of other leaders in order to avoid a crisis of governability and an early collapse of his administration.

Duhalde’s predecessor, Fernando de la Rua, was forced to resign by a wave of looting, food riots and protests halfway through his mandate, in December 2001. His immediate successor, Adolfo Rodríguez Saá, was also toppled, before Duhalde was appointed interim president.

Menem is now being accused of undermining Argentina’s fragile stability at a time when the country has yet to pull out of its worst economic crisis in history. More than half of the population of this once-rich Southern Cone nation of 37 million has fallen into poverty, and nearly a quarter is unemployed.

Just before Menem announced his decision, Kirchner said ”this is an unprecedented attempt by a former president who is unable to get elected to a third term, to ruin everything, without the slightest consideration to the damage he is inflicting.”