By Horacio Verbitsky and - -
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 15 2007 (IPS)

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.

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (CFK) as president and right-wing Mauricio Macri as opposition leader will emerge as the opposing political poles that define the political system, while three of the current candidates – Roberto Lavagna, Elisa Carrio, and Ricardo Lopez Murphy – will fade from the scene, each for different reasons. 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. She began her political career in the now fading justicialist party. Finishing a distant third in the race is Peronist governor of the province of San Luis, Alberto Rodriguez Saa.

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. This new leader of the right succeeded in organising a political force with real electoral muscle, something the country’s ruling classes were incapable of doing for the entire last century, which is why they had to turn the armed forces into the Military Party (with the indispensable participation of the Catholic Church) and co-opt the populist parties, like the radicals and the justicialists.

The colonisation of these groups by the major economic interests during the presidencies of Raul Alfonsin, Carlos Menem, and Fernando de la Rua led to the great crisis of 2001-2002. Five years later, the parties and leaders from that era barely exist and are growing weaker every day. The two current major poles receive support from both the Peronists and the radicals, in different proportions. One of the unknowns is whether these candidates, once elected, will join up with the Victory Front of the PRO or regroup as Peronists and radicals.

Macri 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 (though without this suppressing the legitimate debates about what the left and right are in Argentina today).

None of the political leaders of the last quarter-century are still viable:

-Raul Alfonsin, radical president from 1983-1989, now 80 years old, remains active but is not running for any elected office. He was behind Lavagna’s campaign for president but devoted the majority of his force towards his son’s candidacy for the governorship of the province of Buenos Aires, an illusion with a certain expiration date of Sunday October 28th.

-Carlos Menem, a justicialist president from 1989-99, announced that he would run again for the position but then scaled back his ambitions, trying for the governorship of La Rioja, which he had held from 1973-1976 and 1983-1989. He came in third in the August elections, which meant the end of his political ambitions.

-Fernando de la Rua, a radical president (1999-2001), remains the most sensible of the lot: he left office voluntarily to dedicate himself to his family and to his legal defence against the various accusations of corruption during his term, when his government paid certain senators to support a labour market reform bill, and of the serial assassinations that took place during his last days in office.

-Eduardo Duhalde, justicialist president (2002-03), first announced his retirement and then his plan to reorganise the Justicialist Party. His fantasy is to present a reorganised justicialist movement to Macri or Vice President Daniel Scioli, who lack a party organisation of their own, in order to defeat CFK. Duhalde likes to be called the “chess player”, which would imply a capacity for engineering long-term plans, as in 2003 when he backed Kirchner to block the path of Menem. But at the time Duhalde was strong man of the province of Buenos Aires and interim president of the National Executive Power, which put him in a position to vet and block candidatures. His defeat in 2005 in his own stronghold left lasting marks. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

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