The Peronist majority leader in the Upper House, Senator Miguel Ángel Pichetto, says former president-cum-Senator Cristina Fernández de Kirchner will run for president in 2019.
“The former president will be a candidate”, Pichetto told A24 journalist Luis Novaresio, warning Fernández de Kirchner would try to “take some sectors of the Peronist movement” with her.
“The national Peronist movement must have political construction and political leadership”, the Río Negro province senator explained. “And it must have a candidacy that expresses an alternative.
“The former president will be a candidate. I don’t understand how some analysts and political scientists in Argentina do not understand that”, he said.
Senator Pichetto, who split from Fernández de Kirchner shortly after she left office in late 2015, suggested that CFK would represent “a centre-left front” in the 2019 general elections.
“If she can take sectors of the Peronist movement with her, she will take them, but [regardless of whether she can do this] she will be a candidate”.
He pointed to the activities that CFK’s current electoral front Citizens United (Unidad Ciudadana) is carrying out in the provinces ahead of next year’s general elections, when President Mauricio Macri will face his first major electoral battle.
Pichetto added that as a major opposition candidate CFK would be “the best option for the [Macri] government” because of the polarising effect the former president has on the electorate.
He said her candidacy would recreate the “scenario of polarisation” that helped Macri secure the presidency in 2015 against the Kirchnerite candidate, former Buenos Aires province governor, Daniel Scioli.
See also: Lavanga: Opposition eyes off ex economy minister as 2019 presidential candidate
-TIMES
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