Plenty of campaign buzz around the country but best to start with the hard news: last weekend’s voting in Formosa and Santa Fe.
The former was to renew half the deputies in the 30-seat provincial legislature and pick 30 constituent assembly delegates alongside some municipal authorities. There the focus should be placed on the 30 delegates rather than the 15 deputies for more than quantitative reasons – whereas the legislative voting changed almost nothing, the constituent assembly stands to give a ninth life to a cat with eight terms already under his belt, namely Peronist Governor Gildo Insfrán ruling the province since 1995. Late last year the Supreme Court had declared Formosa’s indefinite re-election to be unconstitutional – the constitutional reform gratuitously added to these midterms proposes to take the Supreme Court ruling on board by instituting a single instead of indefinite re-election but starting again on a clean slate, thus permitting Insfrán to run again in 2027 with a further term beyond to complete four decades in power.
Sunday’s voting gave Insfrán an irresistible two-thirds majority with 21 of the 30 seats for his Partido Justicialista from 205,086 votes (67.3 percent) with six seats for the Frente Amplio Formoseño opposition umbrella from 62,805 votes (20.6 percent) and three seats for La Libertad Avanza libertarians from 34,135 votes (11.2 percent) with the Libres del Sur centre-left out in the cold with 0.84 percent in a turnout of over 65 percent of an electorate of almost half a million – high by this year’s standards.
The legislative turnover was next to static with the outgoing Chamber of Deputies consisting of 22 Justicialist legislators, seven enrolled in the Frente Amplio Formoseño and one representing the Libertad, Trabajo y Progreso party corresponding to the maverick libertarian Senator Francisco Paoltroni (expelled for opposing the Supreme Court nomination of federal judge Ariel Lijo due to his track record of pro-Insfrán court rulings). The new legislature consists of 22 Justicialists, seven in the Frente Amplio Formoseño and one libertarian with the only difference being that the latter is now officially La Libertad Avanza with Paoltroni’s party passing into the Frente Amplio Formoseño where he is now the dominant figure. Too minimal a change to justify any further number-crunching.
Insfrán’s power stems from the provincial government being by far Formosa’s biggest employer with less than six percent of the workforce having formal jobs in the private sector, boosted by shameless patronage with the distribution of food parcels alongside ballots last Sunday and also by the Ley de Lemas system of combined election-primary voting – since his 56 collector lists all coloured blue accounted for 70 percent of all ballots, a result of just over two-thirds could almost be considered disappointing. During the campaign there were no less than 29 inaugurations of schools, hospitals and swimming-pools.
It is both easy and entirely valid to criticise such “feudal” regimes but they do contain elements of benevolent despotism as well as tyranny – the sheer length of time in control often gives these strongmen a hands-on grasp of detail denied more honest politicians with far better intentions (the Rodríguez Saás of San Luis were a case in point, as this journalist experienced when listening to a masterclass on the province delivered by ‘el Adolfo’ at the end of last century). The startling fact that the backward province of Formosa should top last year’s Aprender scholastic aptitude tests should perhaps bring more attention to this point.
The Province of Santa Fe had two parallel elections last Sunday – in Rosario (which houses some 1.45 million of the province’s 3.54 million people with nearly two million in Greater Rosario) where the Peronist Juan Monteverde topped a three-cornered race and the rest of the province where Radical Governor Maximiliano Pullaro’s Unidos para Cambiar Santa Fe list prevailed quite comfortably.
The Peronists would have won more impressively in Rosario had their three lists run together since they would have polled over 40 percent – Monteverde, an erstwhile sidekick of Juan Grabois, won the race with a stridently left-leaning voice in favour of the dispossessed, taking 30.58 percent of the vote for his Más para Santa Fe list but two other lists representing more centre-right and trade unionist strands of Peronism under Roberto Sukerman and Lisandro Cavatorta took almost 10 percent between them. Primary winner Juan Pedro Aleart, the television journalist championing La Libertad Avanza, came in second this time with 28.8 percent due to the recovery of the provincial ruling party with Carolina Labayru picking up 25.63 percent for Unidos para Cambiar Santa Fe and blunting the expected polarisation. Frente de Izquierda leftists (3.1 percent) and the pro-life Somos Vida y Libertad (2.1 percent) rounded out the voting with less than half the electorate going to the polls.
The provincial capital was won comfortably by Pullaro’s Unidos para Cambiar Santa Fe with 32.7 percent of the vote, followed by the Peronist Más para Santa Fe with 24.95 percent and La Libertad Avanza on 23.36 percent. Both an independent list (9.2 percent) and health food fanatic Saúl Perman (5.56 percent) topped the pro-life Somos Vida y Libertad (4.2 percent) in the rest of the voting. Turnout in the province as a whole was 52 percent in this week’s big chill with youth at the forefront of voter apathy.
Not much space left here for developments elsewhere but there will be plenty in future columns with no voting in the pipeline until the end of August. In Buenos Aires Province, the Peronists are groping for unity between the La Cámpora ultra-loyalists of the Kirchner dynasty and the followers of Governor Axel Kicillof (falling into the doghouse this week with the US$16.1-billion price-tag now attached to his 2012 nationalisation of YPF oil), brokered by the 2023 presidential candidate Sergio Massa – taking their time but they will surely get there with a party congress lined up for today. After teaming up on one side of the river with Chaco Radical Governor Leandro Zdero last May (while squeezing out PRO), La Libertad Avanza have pulled out of a similar combo on the other side of the river with Corrientes Radical Governor Gustavo Valdés – estranged Peronist Senator Carlos Mauricio ‘Camau’ Espinola, who all last year had loomed as President Javier Milei’s gubernatorial candidate, is now warming to Valdés. The purist line of presidential chief-of-staff Karina Milei in going it alone seems to be prevailing across the country with the possible exception of Entre Ríos. All to be continued in future columns with petty politics overshadowed by the YPF ruling.
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