The future Senate – Victoria’s secret?

All eyes on Buenos Aires Province but with five weekends still to go before voters redefine its irrelevant legislative branch this column will delay its focus until nearer the time – instead the winter vacation hiatus will be used for an advance look at Senate races while going down memory lane to the 2013 senatorial election in this city to suggest that presidential chief-of-staff Karina Milei’s team could have the right strategy in the wrong order.

If the government’s top priority is to decimate Kirchnerism in the Senate (where it holds almost half the seats as against less than 40 percent in the lower house), that 2013 race could be a useful template. The Peronists have traditionally been a minority in the Federal Capital but invariably the runners-up (as they were again last May), thus entitling them to the third senator behind the winning duo. Back in 2013 they were sitting on around a quarter of the vote with an incumbent senator Daniel Filmus who had earlier been one of Argentina’s better education ministers – clearly a long way behind the locally ruling centre-right PRO under then City Mayor Mauricio Macri with over 40 percent of the vote but facing no other challenge from a hodgepodge of parties in the low single digits (least of all the once dominant Radicals after the 2001-2 meltdown).

But that traditional pattern was shattered by the political skills of Coalición Cívica ARI founder Elisa Carrió in welding her original UCR Radical party and other fragments (including the socialist parties, Margarita Stolbizer’s GEN and the leftist Libres del Sur among others) into a centre-left alliance – porteño fatigue with a decade of Kirchnerism did the rest. The primary produced a slate more to the left than the centre of the alliance with veteran filmmaker Fernando “Pino” Solanas topping the former Radical Cabinet chief Rodolfo Terragno and Macri’s future Economy minister Alfonso Prat Gay but the appearance of a list with a fighting chance of displacing Peronism thrilled many voters – so much so that PRO polled several percent below Macri’s 2011 mayoral re-election with many of their supporters voting tactically for Solanas.

PRO ended up with just under 40 percent, UNEN with almost 28 percent and Filmus 23 percent, losing his seat – Macri’s future vice-president Gabriela Michetti and Diego Santilli (still very much around as one of the architects of PRO being junior partners in the Alianza La Libertad Avanza fighting next month’s elections in Buenos Aires Province) were elected senators for PRO with Solanas displacing Filmus.

That was then. With a different libertarian approach, it could have been replicated now. Earlier this year there could have been a quid pro quo with unconditional support for PRO in this city in return for unconditional support for La Libertad Avanza (with its Peronist overtones) in the Kirchnerite stronghold of Buenos Aires Province. This would have left a nationally strong La Libertad Avanza and a locally dominant PRO free to fight it out for one senator or two in this City in October, squeezing out the incumbent Peronist Senator Mariano Recalde (or whoever is nominated). If we look at the results of last May’s midterms, the various fragments of Macri’s now extinct Juntos por el Cambio coalition polled just over 32 percent of the vote, Manuel Adorni’s La Libertad Avanza 30.7 percent and the Peronist ticket 27.9 percent – this would have made for a photo finish for one senator or two between the current Buenos Aires Province partners while leaving Kirchnerism out of the picture.

Instead the libertarians have done things exactly the other way around, campaigning more against PRO than Kirchnerism last May while seeking to frogmarch the centre-right into a merger with La Libertad Avanza for October’s senatorial elections so that their candidate (almost certainly current Security Minister Patricia Bullrich) can triumph by a huge margin while relinquishing the third seat to Peronism by default.

Nevertheless, looking beyond this city, there could be method in the madness of Karina Milei’s insistence on a “purist” La Libertad Avanza (even if riddled with opportunists) going it alone almost everywhere nationwide, counting on a support closer to the 55 percent of the 2023 runoff than the 30 percent of other races. In more than one province there is potential for polarisation and the traditional two-party system to be replaced by two competitive non-Peronist options leaving Kirchnerism out in the cold along the lines of the 2013 City race.

Every two years a third of the 72 senators are renewed – this year it is the turn of the provinces of Chaco, Entre Ríos, Neuquén, Río Negro, Salta, Santiago del Estero and Tierra del Fuego apart from this City. Of these, the first probably 

lends itself least to any alternative strategy – quite apart from La Libertad Avanza already having teamed up with the locally governing Radicals in Chaco last May, there seems no way to prevent the Peronists from being one of the two leading contestants clinching at least one senator. Entre Ríos with all its centre-right eggs in one basket under Governor Rogelio Frigero also seems to have no alternative to the current La Cámpora senator despite the Edgardo Kueider scandal. But down in Patagonia there is every chance of KIrchnerism being frozen out because the popular Neuquén and Río Negro governors both have their own strong parties with La Libertad Avanza rampant at national level – Neuquén stands to ditch two high-profile Kirchnerites in Oscar Parilli and Silvia Sapag. Another two Unión por la Patria senators should bite the dust in Salta where Governor Gustavo Sáenz (Sergio Massa’s 2015 running-mate now heading an all-party coalition) calls all the shots locally while Javier Milei polled above average in the 2023 run-off. The Tierra del Fuego governor is closer to Kirchnerism than his Patagonian colleague but one of the two Peronist senators looks bound to go with the runaway libertarian lead in the opinion polls. Finally, Santiago del Estero Governor Gerardo Zamora (whose post is up for election this year) has thus far pulled off the unique trick of all three senators with two for his own Civic Front and the third for the national Justicialist Party now chaired by Cristina Kirchner but the latter now looks vulnerable.

Extrapolating the above, Unión por la Patria stands to lose no less than eight of the 24 seats at stake with its caucus shrinking from 34 to 26 but still enough to retain that one third veto so cherished by President Milei.