Senate votes down bill barring former leader Fernández de Kirchner

Argentina’s Congress rejected a bill authored by President Javier Milei Wednesday, leaving open the possibility that former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner could again run for the nation’s top office.

Senators voted for the bill 36 votes to 35, just short of the 37 needed to pass, with no abstentions, after the lower house approved the same bill in February. Known locally as "ficha limpia," or “clean slate,” the bill would have effectively barred Fernández de Kirchner and others convicted of corruption charges from running for or being appointed to any national office.

Milei, writing on his X account, quickly responded by saying the result was “lamentable.”

Treatment of the bill was delayed by months of false starts, previously failing to gather enough support even from members of Milei’s own party to beat back Fernández de Kirchner’s 34 senators in the 72-member chamber. In March, Fernández de Kirchner and her family were banned from entering the US by President Donald Trump.

“Of course, we didn’t see this coming,” Ezequiel Atauche, chief of Milei’s libertarian bloc in the Senate, told reporters after the vote. “When the chamber has more senators and when the lower house has more deputies of La Libertad Avanza, this bill will pass with flying colours.”

In 2022, Fernández de Kirchner was sentenced to six years in prison for graft, but didn’t serve any time because she had legal immunity as the sitting vice-president of Argentina at the time. She also served as president from 2007 to 2015. Her party lost the most recent election to Milei in a landslide loss, but she has remained the most prominent political figure in the opposition.

Fernández de Kirchner has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and dismissed the corruption conviction as politically motivated. In the upcoming October midterm elections, Milei is seeking to significantly bulk up his party’s presence in Congress — currently 15 percent — to advance his pro-market reform agenda. Meanwhile, Fernández de Kirchner was appointed president of the Peronist political movement, with the goal of rebuilding the bloc that dominated Argentina politics for decades.