The demolition job suffered by a PRO City Hall entrenched for almost two decades a fortnight ago has most provinces now thinking twice about advancing their elections and exposing local hegemonies to the forces of heaven – which should not be confused with this month’s torrential downpours but rather a relentless nationalisation transforming Tip O’Neill’s “All politics is local” into an imperfect plebiscite on the Javier Milei Presidency. Misiones and Santa Fe might not have much company in voting next month while Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof may stand alone among his colleagues in seeking to advance provincial elections, as he does in other aspects – PRO’s comeuppance might even give him second thoughts about advancing them at all although less swayed by dread of purple monsters than elsewhere with other factors coming into play.
Two provinces will be holding executive as well as legislative elections this year, picking new governors (even if “new governors” is something of an oxymoron in certain parts of Argentina) and Santiago del Estero at least seems to have decided not to emulate Buenos Aires City Mayor Jorge Macri, burying its voting at both gubernatorial and legislative level with the rest of the country on October 26.
But Corrientes decided otherwise, announcing last Monday that its elections for governor, lieutenant-governor, provincial senators, deputies, mayors and municipal councillors will be held on August 31. Unión Cívica Radical Governor Gustavo Valdés runs the risk confiding in a stronger grip on his district (re-elected with almost 59 percent of the vote in 2021 as against 28.2 percent for Jorge Macri in the 2023 PASO primary, needing Martín Lousteau’s Radical votes to win the mayoral election) while also calculating that no matter how nationalised a local bout, the October elections will be even more national, mindful of how Milei doubled his Corrientes vote between the first and second rounds in 2023. Everything lies ahead in the next 13 weeks with much depending on the definition of candidacies among more than 60 party labels. The Radicals have deep provincial coffers but no candidate to rival the popularity of Valdés who cannot be re-elected after two terms – will the latter parachute his brother Juan Pablo or will the Colombi clan (which ruled the province between 2001 and 2017) make a comeback? Will a libertarian challenge with presumably strong national backing opt for the natural leadership of its La Libertad Avanza deputy Lisandro Almirón or will it go for a game-changer with maverick Peronist Senator Carlos Mauricio ‘Camau’ Espinola (a quadruple Olympic medallist in yachting)? The Peronists (whose presidential ticket won the first round in 2023) are lying low but could they do what Leandro Santoro failed to do in this City and exploit the division between far and moderate right to squeeze ahead?
All these questions and others will be tackled in the next three months as occasion arises but media interest is obviously far more concentrated on Buenos Aires Province than Corrientes – the reason why this column does not follow suit and give the mega-district pride of place is that Corrientes has at least fixed a date, while everything is up in the air in Buenos Aires Province with a series of mating dances in progress. Everybody in the three-cornered fight within Peronism between Kicillof, former two-term president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner now chairing the Partido Justicialista and 2023 presidential candidate Sergio Massa talks unity and they may well even mean it if push comes to shove in the form of a unified opposition with an anti-Milei coalition as a catalyst. The same goes for the other side of the fence – despite the acrimony of the all too recent City election (prolonged last Sunday by the President refusing to shake the Mayor’s hand at the national day Te Deum in the Cathedral), PRO and La Libertad Avanza see an electoral agreement in Buenos Aires Province as being just around the corner but hold back just in cases a confirmation of Peronist disunity allows them to avoid being strange bedfellows. It all seems a question of who blinks first both between and within the two sides – if nobody does, they might all end up gambling on a fragmented election nobody really wants. Who even knows if the September 7 date for provincial elections will finally stand?
In some ways the same tactical debate is underway within the two sides even though Peronism has always aspired to be a majority movement whereas La Libertad Avanza sees itself more as an intense minority. While Presidential Chief-of-Staff Karina Milei (feeling vindicated by the libertarian triumph headed by Manuel Adorni a fortnight ago) preaches a purist line of a campaign uncontaminated by caste, star spin doctor Santiago Caputo seems to think that the price of victory in the Peronist province could even entail sacrificing the La Libertad Avanza label for a more neutral denomination to gather the broadest anti-Kirchnerite coalition possible, although he sometimes also seems to think that extreme fragmentation could pay more dividends than polarisation. And while Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has virtually reduced Peronism to being a Greater Buenos Aires party ideologically circumscribed to the ultra-Kirchnerism of the La Cámpora militants, Kicillof shows interest in other parts of his province and other parties – notably the Radicals, trying to reach their more progressive wing and those simply fed up with being the junior partners of the Juntos por el Cambio coalition and not even that with Milei. Such symmetries make it easier to understand how the City libertarian leader Pilar Ramírez could switch so comfortably from Cristina to Karina.
Next weekend it will be the turn of Misiones to vote – if anything crystallises in the next few days to take the creation of electoral alliances in Buenos Aires Province out of their current state of flux, it will be analysed but failing that, a curtain-raiser for voting in Argentina’s most north-eastern province.
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