Joaquín Morales Solá
Political Analyst
An important portion of the Argentine society chose yesterday to persevere in facism, that path that avoids sacrifice and remains only with small patches for a decimated economy. Sergio Massa’s excellent election also confirms that populism is always possible when half of the society is splashing under the poverty line.
Never before (never before in the last 40 years of democracy, at least) has a presidential candidate squandered so many public resources for the benefit of his own electoral campaign. The various “platita plans” worked perfectly on election Sunday. There were extraordinary cash bonuses for workers and non-workers; there was also a partial elimination of the income tax, which benefited 800 thousand middle class people, and there was the VAT refund to retirees, employees and single taxpayers, which meant more money for nine million Argentines.
With a difference of more than six points with respect to the runner-up, Javier Milei, many observers and experienced electoral officials inferred that the current Minister of Economy is in a better position to be the next President of the Nation. This is only an inference; the second round of elections, to be held on November 19, is always another election, with no relation with the previous ones. What is certain is that the Sunday full of surprises left Massa very close to winning the presidency just yesterday, in the first electoral round. He almost made it, but he could not do so much. He will have to face the ballotage.
It is strange, but in the elections of the day before, the fireman who helped to put out the fire that the same fireman had started, won. Only a very confused society was about to give the victory in the first round to the representative of a political dynasty that destroyed all the stocks of Argentina: from the dollar reserves to the meat, including energy. He left at the doors of the Government House the head of the economic team of a 12 percent monthly inflation and a dollar at the price of 1,000 pesos. Massa is also the new best friend of Cristina Kirchner, the head of a political faction accused of multiple acts of corruption in serious judicial investigations. No one knows, and this is equally true, if this friendship will last beyond the second round of elections.
If you take a good look at Massa’s history, it is very likely that if he were the next president his first decisions as president would be aimed at relieving the current vice-president as head of Peronism. Massa has more friends than is known in the courts; this is bad news for Cristina Kirchner. Nothing better than repeated judicial convictions against her to consummate her political replacement.
“All rational arguments and their exponents were burned”, concluded last night a leader of Juntos por el Cambio, after observing Massa’s election, including himself. The surprising results of the Minister of Economy occurred after the images of Martin Insaurralde wasting dollars, which no official position can give him, in the most exclusive coast of Spain. There could be no doubt that such expenses were possible because there were numerous acts of corruption on the part of who was the second official of the province of Buenos Aires, after Governor Axel Kicillof. It turns out that Kicillof was also re-elected by a very wide margin of votes. Julio Rigau, better known as Chocolate, was also seen taking money from debit cards of 49 ñoquis (parasites) employees of the Legislature of the province of Buenos Aires. It was later learned that there are several characters like “Chocolate” Rigau in the Buenos Aires Legislature, but it is not known how many political parties are engaged in such practices. In fact, the opposition Juntos por el Cambio has a representative in the leadership of the provincial Legislature; he is Fabián Perechodnik, vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies. But nothing happened. Nobody was moved either by Insaurralde’s costly spree in the Mediterranean or by the waste of political clientelism in the province with the highest number of poor people in the country. Both Insaurralde and Rigau express second-line politicians. Insaurralde was until 2021 only the mayor of Lomas de Zamora, and the senators and deputies of Buenos Aires are of insignificant political importance. It is worth pointing out such political trifles and the amount of ill-gotten money to infer the dimension of political corruption in Argentina.
In any case, it has already happened that Argentines, or an important part of them, have shown an incredible tolerance to Peronism’s corruption. Carlos Menem was reelected in 1995 when there were already several allegations of corruption against him and his officials in the courts, and Cristina Kirchner was reelected in 2011 when several judges were also investigating alleged acts of corruption during the Kichnerism boom. In fact, the original complaint for the corrupt management of the resources of Vialidad Nacional for the benefit of Lázaro Báez (i.e. for the benefit of the Kirchners themselves) was filed in 2008 by Elisa Carrió together with several other deputies, Patricia Bullrich among them.
It is a novelty, yes, that the devastating march of the economy has not been taken into account by an important sector of Argentines. This new Argentinean extravagance will force to write other manuals on political science and polls. The old pollsters’ assertion that elections were won only by governments with a healthy economy has been shattered. This is where the influence of populism on very poor societies comes into play; the Capital is a good example of how electoral results are different when there are citizens free from state patronage. On the other hand, coinciding news reports underlined that in the Buenos Aires suburbs and in the poor provinces of northern Argentina, the powerful party apparatuses of Peronism, which take advantage of social hardship, operated as they had not done in the primaries of August 13. It is also true that Massa’s comfortable victory is the result of the division of the opposition. If the votes obtained by Milei and Bullrich were added, only one opposition candidate would have won in the first round.
“It will be a summer shower”. That was the blunt conclusion of an old electoral official about Milei’s presence in Argentine politics after seeing the final results of yesterday’s elections. Milei will have an important block of national deputies, but it is certain that Massa will prefer to negotiate with the Juntos por el Cambio block, which will also be significant. There he has, at least, old interlocutors such as the radicals Martín Lousteau, Emiliano Giacobitti and Gerardo Morales himself. Last night, there was even a rumor that some leaders of Juntos por el Cambio asked Bullrich not to criticize Massa. Let’s go back to Milei.
The libertarian candidate hid the last week so that his disruptive character would not play a dirty trick on him, but he could not hide the whole gang that surrounds him. Then appeared a candidate for national MP who promised a law so that men could renounce paternity, if they suspected that the woman premeditatedly broke the condom, to the extreme right-wing intellectual Alberto Benegas Lynch, who announced that he would advise Milei to break off relations with the Vatican as long as the pope is the Argentine Jorge Bergoglio. The Church stood up. Politicians used to the religious leadership of Cardinal Mario Poli, who never spoke in public, nobody imagined that the new Archbishop of Buenos Aires and Primate of the country, Monsignor Jorge García Cuerva, would let an offense to the Pontiff go unanswered. García Cuerva spoke publicly of a Church “shocked” by Benegas Lynch’s statements, a speech that was surely repeated in almost all the Sunday Masses. Perhaps the Church has shown, in this way, that it retains a considerable ascendancy in vast sectors of Argentine society. Milei was far from the results predicted by all polls. He even obtained less votes than in the August primaries, when all public opinion polls placed him in first place, disputing with good forecasts a ballottage with Massa. It was the Minister of Economy, on the other hand, who added 8 percentage points more to the percentage he achieved in August.
Juntos por el Cambio also dropped almost six points with respect to the August elections. It paid dearly for the lack of plasticity it had in not perceiving that the hard dispute between Patricia Bullrich and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta took place in a context in which its two main opponents, Massa and Milei, were not competing with anyone. Worse: Peronism did what it always does; that is, it disciplines itself only in the electoral eve until it conquers power. Then, it usually returns to its usual internal quarrels to discern who is in charge. On the contrary, Juntos por el Cambio lived an intense internal struggle until only the August primaries resolved the dispute between Bullrich and Rodríguez Larreta. All the Cambiemite leaders (not only Bullrich and Rodríguez Larreta) modified the natural course of destiny, but against themselves. Only two years ago, in 2021, they amply won the mid-term legislative elections. They only had to choose a presidential candidate (or a female candidate) and not to make a mistake on the road to power. They were wrong, as anyone can see, and now they will have to roll up their sleeves so that the coalition of Republicans, which brought their leaders to power in 2015, does not break.
In two years, Juntos por el Cambio lost more than 18 percentage points. On the contrary, Peronism recovered more than three points with respect to 2021. Yesterday, the opposition coalition that governed between 2015 and 2019 was left out of the playing field. Only Massa and Milei will be there for the next month, until November 19. The temptation of a breakup will exist in several of the leaders of Juntos por el Cambio, no doubt, but none of them will have another chance of power if that alliance of parties were to fragment. They will have to choose a new leader, because neither Bullrich nor Rodríguez Larreta are already in a position to demand that political leadership. And, above all, they will have to understand that political victory is always the result of a neat, difficult, arduous and constant work.
© This article was originally published in La Nación and reproduced in EditoRed
