Everyone’s Playing Dirty In Argentina’s PASO Primaries

Politics has always been a dirty game, but in Argentina’sPASO primaries the mischief came to the fore. The deisgnation of Sergio Massa as the frontrunner of the Unión por la Patria ticket was fraught with Roman-style betrayal. Things are getting serious and the political system is showing its true colors. Massa’s antics – both to secure the nomination at the expense of his rivals and in the municipality of Tigre – act as a harbinger of things to come, revealing the level of his ambition and thirst for power. Ultra-liberal economist Javier Milei, in the eye of the storm for allegedly offering up places on his party’s ticket for cold hard cash, comes as his star begun to wane in opinion polls. The libertarian still retains a healthy portion of the voting intention figures, which suggest he will have a say in the election and, in some respect, in the coming administration’s capacity to govern. For Juntos por el Cambio, the opposition alliance that thought they had the election in the bag, the schism between Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and Patricia Bullrich has threatened coalition unity, to the point where the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) entered into bitter disputes with Mauricio Macri’s PRO party, historically a primus inter pares. The primaries are essentially a first-round vote and will set the stage for a much disputed general election where every player still has chances, much more so given the expectation of a run-off vote in November.

Massa has a lot of detractors and has been identified as an ambitious opportunist by those who dislike him (it was Macri who previously dubbed him “ventajita” or “petty advantage.”). Despite having once been a flaming anti-Kirchnerite who promised to end the corruption perpetrated by La Cámpora — the Kirchnerite political organization led by Máximo Kirchner — he has ended up becoming Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s leading candidate for president. The Frente Renovador leader worked hard to sabotage the aspirations of both Interior Minister Eduardo ‘Wado’ De Pedro — CFK’s political protégé — and Daniel Scioli, the former Buenos Aires Province governor who was also Néstor Kirchner’s vice-president and lost the 2015 presidential run-off to Macri. Whatever he actually did, Massa secured the blessings from Fernández de Kirchner and President Alberto Fernández, along with the key support of provincial governors, probably in exchange for key concessions in every case. His allies appear to have been left off of some of the key spots on the congressional tickets with Máximo leading the lists in the Chamber of Deputies and Wado in the Senate, and didn’t managed to secure a “unity” candidacy with leftist social leader Juan Grabois desisting from having desisted from his bid. Grabois is much more palatable for the more purist Kirchnerites than Massa, a man with ties to the political establishment in the United States and the private sector in Argentina, but the economy minister could absorb a potentially tough electoral defeat without draining the Kirchners’ political capital all that much.