A COUNTDOWN clock hangs over the
desks in the open-plan political headquarters of Mauricio Macri, the mayor of
Buenos Aires, who hopes to be Argentina’s next president. It tells
skinny-jeaned campaign workers how many days, hours and minutes there are
“until change”. The clock will hit zero on August 9th, when political parties
hold primaries to select their presidential candidates. Then, presumably, it
will be reset for the first round of the election itself, to be held on October
25th.
The primaries are less momentous
than the clock suggests. There is little suspense about who will win. Mr Macri
(pictured, left) is way ahead of rivals to be the candidate of Cambiemos
(“Let’s change”), an electoral front that consists of his Republican Proposal
and two other parties. The other main contender for the presidency is likely to
be Daniel Scioli (pictured, right), the governor of Buenos Aires province. He
is the only candidate from the Front for Victory (FPV), the party of
Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
Even so, the primaries matter. If
pollsters’ guesses are correct, the presidential election is a two-horse race.
Sergio Massa, a charismatic congressman from the Justicialist Party who was
ahead in the polls a year ago, is far behind now. Ms Fernández, after months of
prevarication, has thrown her support behind Mr Scioli, who was Argentina’s
vice-president when her late husband, Néstor Kirchner, was president. The
primaries are thus likely to show that Argentines face a choice between the
continuity that Mr Scioli represents and the change that Mr Macri
promises.
Unlike the rowdy presidential
primaries in the United States, Argentina’s “simultaneous open obligatory
primaries” (PASO) are not an exercise in intra-party democracy. Ms Fernández,
who introduced the system in 2009, called it at the time “the most important
political reform” since democracy was restored in 1983. There is little
evidence for that. None of the candidates faces a serious challenge from within
his own electoral coalition. Argentina’s interior and transport minister,
Florencio Randazzo, an ally of Ms Fernández, might have posed a threat to Mr
Scioli. Mr Scioli extinguished it by choosing the president’s closest
(non-family) confidant, Carlos Zannini, to be his running mate. Ms Fernández
duly persuaded Mr Randazzo to withdraw his candidacy.
The real point of PASO voting, many
analysts think, is to spare politicians nasty surprises in a country where
opinion polls are unreliable. Ms Fernández introduced it after her party was
routed in mid-term elections. Voters have to take part. They choose which
party’s primary to vote in, and that indicates which candidate they are likely
to support in the later election. In primaries held before the last
presidential ballot, in 2011, the FPV’s contest (between Ms Fernández and a
host of others) attracted more voters than that of any other party. She went on
to win by a landslide. “In the absence of credible surveys, the PASO elections
are a true thermometer for what each candidate’s chances are going into
October,” says Juan Cruz Diaz of Cefeidas, a research group.
That has not stopped pollsters from
making their own predictions. The only point of agreement is that this year’s presidential
contest will be closer than the last one. Aresco, an Argentine polling group,
expects Mr Scioli to win in the first round; IPSOS predicts that Mr Macri will
prevail in a run-off on November 22nd.
The election is shaping up as a
referendum on kirchnerismo, the brand of Peronist populism practised by
Kirchner, who became president in 2003, and by his wife, who succeeded him. Mr
Macri, a scion of a business family, built his centre-right party from scratch
by opposing everything the Kirchners stand for. He promises to restore
independence to institutions that Ms Fernández has co-opted, including the
judiciary and the statistics agency, to remove trade barriers and currency
controls that she imposed in 2011 and to quell inflation. He would probably try
to reach agreement with holders of foreign debt, on which Argentina has
defaulted.
Mr Scioli is building his campaign
around voters among whom Ms Fernández still exerts Evita-like charm. Her image
is all over his campaign adverts and billboards. Although inflation is high and
the economy is shrinking, a large proportion of Argentina’s 40m citizens
benefits from Ms Fernández’s lavish spending on subsidies, benefits and
government jobs (see chart). By choosing Mr Zannini to be his running mate, Mr
Scioli has greatly improved his chances of holding on to their support.
Yet the divide between Mr Scioli and
Mr Macri is not as stark as it first appears. Even before the primaries, Mr
Macri has started moving toward the political centre. He says he has no plans
to privatise the money-losing state airline or YPF, a big oil company that Ms
Fernández nationalised in 2012. Welfare schemes are an “earned right”, Mr Macri
declares. His chief of staff says he will not cut subsidies deeply or lay off
government workers en masse. The change candidate has mainly changed his own
mind, sneer his opponents.
Mr Scioli avoids that risk by saying
as little as possible. His friends say he cosies up to Ms Fernández only out of
political necessity; in office he will be his own man. After August 9th
Argentines will be able to make a better guess about who will take office as
president in December. Just what sort of leader he will turn out to be will
become clear when he starts governing.
from The Economist
