The City and the Senate

No innovations of consequence in the past week – markets are exuberantly calm with country risk in full retreat while the centralisation of power is being consolidated, contrary to advice to broaden the political base both from home and abroad, with much attention falling on the potentially endless ‘Cuadernos’ (“notebooks”) corruption trial. So every reason for this column to continue with the detailed analysis of last month’s midterms – after tidying up the country’s largest constituency last Saturday, today’s focus is on this city, which elected senators as well as deputies, and on the Senate as a whole.

While the government’s overall midterm triumph represented a huge shift from gloomy pre-electoral expectations, this city’s results did not show that much change from last May’s local voting. In broad terms, Alianza La Libertad Avanza obtained approximately the sum total of the votes won by the brand-new Cabinet Chief Manuel Adorni and PRO’s Silvia Lospennato last May (with the high profile of outgoing National Security Minister Patricia Bullrich securing an extra three percent at senatorial level to notch an absolute majority) while incumbent Senator Mariano Recalde also won around three percent more for Fuerza Patria than last May’s local candidate Leandro Santoro despite a less moderate image, probably benefitting from tactical leftist votes with no chance of a senatorial seat.

The final official results for Buenos Aires City after recounts are as follows at the two levels: La Libertad Avanza 854,122 (two senators) and 783,585 votes (seven of the 13 deputies), Fuerza Patria 519,119 (one senator) and 445,340 (four deputies), the leftist Frente de Izquierda 92,657 and 150,523 (returning Myriam Bregman to Congress after also winning a seat in the 2021 midterms), a historic record with over nine percent, and Ciudadanos Unidos, the local ally of Provincias Unidas, 86,100 and 99,034 (enabling outgoing Unión Cívica Radical party chairman Martín Lousteau to move from the upper to the lower house of Congress). Of the remaining 13 lists, only Alianza Potencia running incumbent deputy Ricardo López Murphy (who obtained 67,144 votes or almost four percent) and Hagamos Futuro (also running an incumbent deputy, Hernán Reyes of Coalición Cívica-ARI, with 29,701 votes) topped one percent in both vote counts although at senatorial level Margarita Stolbizer’s GEN deploying Facundo Manes topped two percent with 38,867 votes. Some pundits (including this columnist) expected both Lousteau and López Murphy to make more inroads into both ends of the polarisation but only a quarter of the vote shunned the two main lists. A total of 1,756,902 votes were cast out of an electorate numbering 2,520,249 citizens for a turnout of almost 70 percent.

This City’s future senators are thus Bullrich, Recalde and the economist Agustín Monteverde. Of the seven deputies elected for La Libertad Avanza (LLA) headed by Alejandro Fargosi of the Council of Magistrates, only incumbent deputy Sabrina Ajmechet (recently switching from PRO to LLA and close to Bullrich) and Fernando de Andreis, a key aide of ex-president Mauricio Macri, are previously known. Apart from Bregman and Lousteau, the remaining deputies are Fuerza Patria – incumbent left-leaning deputy Itai Hagman, former Labour minister Kelly Olmos, Santiago Roberto and Lucia Cámpora (whose militancy can be guessed from her surname). A cheap attempt was made in pro-government media to unseat Lousteau by showing him running behind the eighth LLA quotient in half the comunes but his vote well over six percent was always firmly ahead of the competing LLA quotient well under.

Little more remains to be said about this capital with the LLA-PRO alliance winning in all 15 communes, including absolute majorities in Recoleta (2), Belgrano (13) and Palermo (14) at both levels and also in Villa Devoto (11) and Saavedra (12) at senatorial although the difference was less than one percent in Villa Lugano (8).

Next stop is Santiago del Estero, which voted for simply everything with outgoing Governor and senator-elect Gerardo Zamora ending up with everything with huge majorities. Provincial Cabinet Chief Elías Suárez (Radical in origin like Zamora himself) will be the new governor next month with 437,556 votes or almost 74 percent (and even an absolute majority of the total electorate). Almost all remaining votes went to two gubernatorial candidates reaching a double-digit percentage – the Radical provincial deputy Alejandro Parnás with 65,018 votes and La Libertad Avanza’s Italo Cioccalani with 61,584 votes – while seven other candidates polled 4.79 percent of the vote between them. In the provincial legislature Zamora’s Frente Cívico (18) and the allied Fuerza Patria Peronista (14) cleaned up 80 percent of the 40 seats between them with four each for Despierta Santiago (Parnás) and La Libertad Avanza.

National Congress voting enabled Zamora to bag all three senators and all three deputies at stake on the basis of two of each for his Frente Cívico and one of each for Fuerza Patria. The former won 329,634 and 290,968 votes at the two levels and the latter 113,630 and 117,748, or together almost three-quarters of the 606,179 votes cast out of an electorate of 813,327 – in other words, three-quarters of three-quarters. La Libertad Avanza’s senatorial candidate Tomás Figueroa finished well behind with 80,324 votes, followed by 48,079 for Despierta Santiago (respectively 81,467 and 58,520 for these two parties in the voting for deputies) while the other three lists barely totalled 15,000 votes. These figures pretty much speak for themselves. Zamora, Elia Moreno and incumbent Peronist senator José Neder will be representing the province in the upper house. Until now Zamora has been an often hard-line Kirchnerite but he is ultimately his own man and may now be seeing a different writing on the wall.

This city and Santiago del Estero are special for different reasons – the other provinces voting in new senators were (in order of size of population) Salta, Entre Ríos, Chaco (all with seven-digit electorates) and the three Patagonian provinces of Río Negro, Neuquén and Tierra del Fuego. 

The libertarians won in all these provinces except Río Negro where their senatorial candidate Lorena Villaverde was tagged with the ‘Fred’ Machado scandal eliminating José Luis Espert and lost out by less than 5,000 votes (with that scandal thus having an impact in Machado’s native Patagonia that it failed to have in its epicentre of Buenos Aires Province). Since two senators accrue to the winner, this would add up to 12 new LLA senators plus Villaverde, except that in Chaco the libertarians allied with the Radical provincial government whose lieutenant-governor Silvana Schneider was on the winning ticket narrowly defeating former three-term Peronist governor Jorge Capitanich, thus making for a dozen purple senators. The Kirchnerite haul was all three in Santiago del Estero, two in Río Negro (Martín Soria and Ana Marks) and minority senators in the Federal Capital (Recalde), Chaco (Capitanich), Entre Ríos (Adán Bahl) and Tierra del Fuego (incumbent Cándida López) while being shut out of Salta and Neuquén. In those provinces they were respectively replaced by former Energy Secretary Flavia Royón and Julieta Corroza, both Cabinet members of the local provincial governments.

The overall impact of these results was to reduce the Unión por la Patria caucus from 34 to 28 while taking the LLA up to 18 with most of the remaining 26 senators potentially in their pocket.

Further details on senatorial voting may emerge in next week’s column, which will be dedicated to inland voting (excluding Santiago del Estero) accounting for 18 of the 24 senators and 76 of the 127 deputies elected last month.