High court ruling, secret document discovery overshadow Argentina's midterm elections results.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
Argentina's governing coalition lost ground and yet held on to its congressional majority in midterm elections held Oct. 27. At stake were half the deputies (129) and one-third of the senators (24) who will accompany Presidential Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (CFK) during the last two years of her second and presumably final term in office (NotiSur, Sept. 20, 2013).
The governing coalition--just as it did four years ago, in the 2009 midterms (NotiSur, July 10, 2009)--lost the country's five largest districts, areas that together represent nearly 63% of the electorate. The winners in all five cases were political parties aligned only in their opposition to a model of government that for the past decade--starting in 2003, when President Nestor Kirchner (2003-2007), CFK's husband, took charge of a country in flames (NotiSur, May 23, 2003)--has produced wide-reaching political, economic, and social changes.
For reasons of electoral arithmetic, the government--despite those key losses--maintained a narrow advantage in both houses of Congress and is thus assured continuing legislative support. For the governing Frente para la Victoria (FPV), the results offer something of a calm before the pending storm that awaits in 2015, when Argentina holds its next presidential election. Having already served consecutive terms, CFK will not be allowed to run again. Her pending departure is creating a power vacuum within the FPV, which is likely to produce a swarm of would-be contenders vying for the chance to succeed her. Complicating matters for the FPV is that for now, at least, there are no truly viable candidates on the horizon.
As was also the case with past midterm elections, the results have generated a lot of premature media buzz regarding potential opposition presidential candidates. In 2009, the emergent figure--created and propelled by the daily newspapers Clarin and La Nacion--was businessman Francisco de Narvaez, who won a formidable 34.5% of the votes cast in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina's largest electoral district. His popularity has since evaporated. De Narvaez lost his deputy seat in last month's election, winning just 5.5% of the vote.
This time around, the person looking to occupy De Narvaez's place as the post-election media darling is Sergio Massa, a political leader from the same rightist Peronist faction that gave rise to the FPV. Massa emerged during the final two months leading up to the vote thanks, as always, to Grupo...
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