POLITICAL LANDSCAPE OF ARGENTINA ABOUT TO CHANGE

If Argentina\'s October 28 presidential elections come off the way the polls indicate, the political reality of the country as of 2008 will be sharply different from what we see in the current campaigns, writes Horacio Verbitsky, Argentine journalist and writer, president of the Centre for Social and Legal Studies (CELS), and author of Robo para la corona, El vuelo, and other books. In this analysis, Verbitsky writes that Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (CFK), as president, and right-wing Mauricio Macri, as opposition leader, will emerge as the defining poles of the political system, while three of the other current candidates -Roberto Lavagna, Elisa Carrio, and Ricardo Lopez Murphy- will fade from the scene. The historical radical and justicialist parties will give way to the PRO of Macri and the Victory Front, which supports current president Nestor Kirchner and is backing CFK, his wife, in the election. Polls show CFK winning with 39 to 55 percent of the votes, leading the runner up by no less than thirty points. Macri was elected governor of the Federal Capital on June 24 with a 61 percent majority. After this overwhelming victory, he ignored pressure to run in this election but did not hide the fact he is preparing to run in 2011. He is the big missing factor in this campaign, but after the elections he will emerge as the primary non-Kirchnerian political figure. The system imagined by the government with a centre-left force opposed to a centre-right seems about to come into existence as none of the political leaders of the last quarter-century are still viable.