After the summer holidays, the Argentine president, the Peronist Alberto Fernández, opens this Wednesday a political course full of enigmas to be solved in the coming months. The main unknown will be cleared up in October, when elections with unpredictable results are held and where at this point there are still no defined candidates.
The political uncertainty is such that when Fernández offers his annual speech before parliament today -as every March 1-, Argentines will not know if the president is running for re-election. In fact, he probably doesn’t even know it.
Four years ago, Fernández was designated a unitary candidate of Peronism by decision of former president Cristina Fernández, who reserved the candidacy for the vice presidency, which she occupies today.
But as was foreseeable in 2019, Fernández and Fernández have ended up fighting. A confrontation that began underground and that for months has already been an open and stark war whose objective is for the president to announce that he will not be a candidate.
Just like four years ago, its vice president, who has shown several times who is in charge of the government, wants to impose the Peronist candidate to maintain the unity of the Frente de Todos, the coalition that won the 2019 elections, unseating the then liberal president. Mauricio Macri, whose resounding failure in economic management left the country heavily in debt to the IMF, an organization that in Argentina is almost unpronounceable and synonymous with crisis.
Although the polls are volatile, often interested and focused on Buenos Aires and its metropolitan area -40% of the census-, all agree that Cristina Fernández continues to be the leader with the strongest support, which remains almost unchanged at around 25 % of voters. However, she also garners high rejection rates. For this reason, she again considers her candidacy ruled out, beyond the fact that in December she was sentenced to six years in prison for corruption and perpetual disqualification from holding public office, a sentence that is not yet final.
However, the vice president does not aspire to put a Kirchnerista of her rank as a candidate, but the move to retain power involves elevating Sergio Massa, leader of the third faction of the ruling coalition and representative of the most conservative Peronism.
Former presidential candidate in 2015, when he came third, last August Massa agreed to take over the hot potato called the Ministry of Economy to try to show some improvement in the crisis the country is experiencing. So far, he has not succeeded.
Once again, the economy -and not having won the soccer World Cup- will decide the future of Argentina, which has almost 100% annual inflation, 40% poverty and an exodus of Argentines in search of better opportunities. out of the country; exodus that already exceeds the one that took place after the corralito crisis in 2001.
The polls also agree that the opposition leader with the greatest intention to vote is the mayor of Buenos Aires, the macrista Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, a manager with a centrist profile who, if he wants to be president, will have to prevail in the mandatory primaries in August over the other pre-candidates of the center-right coalition Together for Change. However, Larreta is, for the moment, the only candidate who has already officially announced his candidacy.
Although the most striking phenomenon in the polls is the brilliant rise of the ultra-liberal Javier Milei, an anti-establishment outsider economist who has all the numbers to become the big surprise of these elections. The August primaries will draw a clearer picture. As happened with Trump or Bolsonaro, the paths of social discontent are inscrutable.
