Anatomy of a macrocephalic

The tyrannies of a midweek press time for this column means that in this age of instant communications a full analysis of the electoral alliances in Buenos Aires Province is reaching the patient reader over a week late, given the impossibility of presenting the complete spectrum the last time. This column will equally be running behind the definition of the candidates whose deadline is today – but expiring at midnight so a column slated for today’s breakfast table cannot reasonably be expected to be up to speed. Fortunately no such delays when it comes to the actual election on September 7 – that weekend’s column will not only be the day before but theoretically constrained by th curfew.

By midnight last Independence Day nine electoral fronts had been registered for the Buenos Aires Province elections on September 7 although most pundits are anticipating polarisation between the provincially ruling Peronists and the nationally ruling libertarians. Last Saturday’s column centred on Alianza La Libertad Avanza absorbing centre-right PRO along with 25 other parties – next week’s column will be looking at how the candidacies will be distributed between them later today. Coincidentally Fuerza Patria (the latest brand name chosen by Peronism) is also a 26-party front, one for each letter of the alphabet. It is both the most and least united of the fronts – most united because there are no splinters elsewhere, unlike its competitors, and least united because the tension between ex-president Cristina Kirchner and Governor Axel Kicillof brokered by 2023 presidential runner-up Sergio Massa has them further away than anybody else from the definition of candidacies which must be reached by witching hour tonight.

The other seven fronts fall into three categories: four are centrist or rightist also-rans, Frente de Izquierda (FIT) partially unites the left and there are two other combos so obscure (Es con Vos, Es con Nosotros and Espacio Abierto para el Desarrollo y la Integración Social) that they will henceforth be ignored. Budget Committee chairman (and recent manure target) José Luis Espert is now so firmly ensconced in government ranks that he should be confirmed as the top of the Alianza La Libertad Avanza ticket come midnight but in the last midterms he was President Javier Milei’s libertarian rival and some splinters linger – an Avanza Libertad coalition is running apart while Guillermo MacLoughlin’s Fuerza Liberal Bonaerense is a similar grouping of Espert origin. No matter how hard it tries, the left can never close ranks – Manuela Castañeira of Nuevo MAS invariably goes her own way and there is also Marcelo Ramal’s Trotskyist Política Obrera. The three more centrist options are Potencia under Mauricio Macri loyalist María Eugenia Talerico (conservatives with too many republican scruples to join Milei’s bandwagon), Nuevos Aires (combining Peronists elected as libertarians and now forming their own caucus in the legislature along with the odd Radical) and Somos Buenos Aires, the most serious stab at a third way and perhaps worth a separate paragraph.

Somos Buenos Aires aspires to bring together the components which gave former Córdoba governor Juan Schiaretti a respectable 6.7 percent of the vote in the last presidential elections. Politicians of Peronist and Radical origins carry almost equal weight within this coalition. The Peronist side includes important Greater Buenos Aires mayors like Julio Zamora (Tigre) and Fernando Gray (Esteban Echevarría), ex-mayors like Joaquín de la Torre and Juan Zabaleta, Macri’s Congress Speaker Emilio Monzó and national deputy Florencio Randazzo. The Radicals including several mayors and the high-profile national deputy Facundo Manes are institutionally with this front even if some are with Nuevos Aires while others are bewitched by Milei. The 14 parties making up this alliance also include Elisa Carrió’s Coalición Cívica, Margarita Stolbizer’s GEN and the Socialists among others. No lack of chiefs but how many Indians for this middle way?

So much for the competitors for votes, who are the voters? Numbering 14,376,592, they are divided into eight electoral sections, of which the two covering the Greater Buenos Aires urban sprawl account for approximately 70 percent. Pundits tend to be overawed by the sheer size of this “mother of battlefields” giving the province its macro-cephalic anatomy but there are a couple of quantitative and qualitative points here which are often overlooked. While the last census of 2022 showed that Argentina’s population had risen some 15 percent since the Bicentenary count of 2010 (the day of Néstor Kirchner’s death), the population of Greater Buenos Aires only rose nine percent – people are finally moving out of this poverty trap, hard as it may be to believe (thus disbelief that La Matanza grew less than four percent in that period led to accusations that the 2010 figures had been padded to draw more handouts but who knows)? Secondly, people are not only moving out of Greater Buenos Aires but within – so much so that for the first time the third section (containing the staunchly Peronist and poverty-stricken South Side where 5,101,177 voters are now registered) has been overtaken by the first section with the more prosperous northern suburbs and 5,131,861 voters. Will this demographic shift also be reflected by an electoral shift come September?

Subtracting GBA leaves 4,143,554 inland voters. Beyond the metropolis there are three major cities – the Atlantic resort of Mar del Plata with almost 700,000 inhabitants dominating the 5th section where 1.29 million voters are registered and the provincial capital of La Plata forming the 8th with an electorate of 576,691 voters while recently flood-stricken Bahía Blanca (6th section with 652,077 voters) is also important. The second section (around the delta with 649,865 voters), and the central fourth (540,034 voters) and seventh (the most rural of all with only 281,130 voters) sections complete the list.