Argentina General Discussion 🇦🇷

[Cortarán todas las flores, pero jamás detendrán la primavera]

Leavy said he'll vote in favour. If Weretilneck confirms his positive vote, the bill will get to 38.

[Cortarán todas las flores, pero jamás detendrán la primavera]

There must be more factors at play, but surely the result in the provinces reflects the geographical origin of the candidates and which one was backed by the PJ local machine. The three peronist candidates won in a landslide in their home provinces: La Rioja (Menem), San Luis (Rodriguez Saa) and Santa Cruz (Kirchner). Duhalde controlled the PJ in Buenos Aires ptovince and helped Kirchner to win there, although the vote was very splitted throughout the province (Kirchner took the Conurbano, the rest looks like a mosaic). Aside from Menem in the north and Kirchner in the south, Rodriguez Saa won in the central-western Cuyo region (San Luis, Mendoza and San Juan) Lopez Murphy performed well among urban middle class voters (BS As city and some provincial capitals were his strongholds), as well as Lilita Carrio (she did well in CABA and Santa Fe province). Both Lopez Murphy and Carrio came from the UCR and did much better than the official candidate Moreau

This is pretty on point, but to add a few things:
1- Menem won the north, except for two provinces, Jujuy and Formosa. In both cases, provincial governors/strongmen Gildo Insfrán and Eduardo Fellner threw their support (and their electoral machineries) behind Kirchner, giving him the win there.
2- Menem won in santa fe, but Carrió came a very close secod, she won in the city of santa fe as well as the south of the province, including Rosario. I looked it up and it turns out she was allied to the socialist party, which, for whatever reason, has always been pretty strong in Santa Fe. The socialist candidate for governor actually got the most votes in the gubernatorial election that year, but got screwed over by the Ley de lemas system.
3- López Murphy came second in Córdoba, which is unsurprising as the province has always been favourable to the UCR, but i'm surprised he didn't win in the city of Córdoba. The provincial capital is a radical stronhold, but i assume that electorate was divided between López Murphy and Carrió, and Menem had already won the city in 1995. López Murphy also won in Bahía Blanca (again, not surprising, also a radical bastion), but i don't know why he did so well in the surrounding areas. Maybe he got the endorsement of a local bigwig, that or his message really resonated with the pople of that region.
4- The vote was dispersed and more or less evenly split in almost all provinces, except in the home turfs of the three peronist candidates, they all got absurdly high percentages in their provinces, upwards of 75%. Goes to show how effective peronists can be at building well oiled political machineries, which are still in place today, the Kirchner and the Rodriguez saá families still control their respective provinces, and menem remains very popular in La Rioja.

[Cortarán todas las flores, pero jamás detendrán la primavera]

It would be a major success story for the Left Front to maintain. their momentum and polling numbers at this point. I honestly think they might be the most successful Marxist party in Latin America since the Cold War.

For one thing, I highly doubt the Left Front is just running on their official spokesman’s charisma, most times we’ve seen one man alliance bands collapse and burn fast. The Left Front has been at this for years and have gained support even when the pulse of the nation has shifted rightward.

Well, the left front has successfuly carved itself a nice little niche of educated middle and upper-middle class urbanites, with some support from actuall working class people, that can keep it above the 1,5% paso threshold, but it still struggles to really expand beyond that. Many (if not most) of their voters aren't marxists, they're just progressives, and in a polarized election like that of 2019, they'll go with whomever can defeat the more right wing candidate, that's why the FIT lost almost 300 thousand votes from 2015 to 2019. Now that the kirchnerists are back in power, they might get some of those votes back, but they'll have to step up their game.

Also, i wouldn't call Del Caño "charismatic", i like him and he seems like a nice guy, but he's also a really goofy, akward dude, he's basically a meme at this point. And it's not like they lack other figures (Bregman, Solano, Del Pla, etc), they just aren't well known because they haven't had the national spotlight that is a presidential election.

[Cortarán todas las flores, pero jamás detendrán la primavera]

RIP Menem, he died like he lived, leeching off the state and successfully evading punishment for all his crimes.

[Cortarán todas las flores, pero jamás detendrán la primavera]

Alberto asked for Health Minister Gonzáles García's resignation after journalist Verbitsky revealed in an interview he called García in order to get vaccinated.

That people in power use said power to vaccinate their friends, family, and themselves, is barely surprising at this point. But i find the way this story broke out so bizarre. Either Verbitsky is an absolute moron (and a terrible friend), or he did this on purpose, knowing full well what it would lead to. After all, this is a man with deep connections to the judiciary, intelligence agencies, and the political sphere (i think he has direct line with Cristina Kirchner). On who's behalf he could have done this, i couldn't say. Certainly not Alberto, he may have wanted to get rid of Ginés, but not this way, this would be an incomprehensible self-inflicted wound, ammunition for the opposition, and just a generally embarrassing situation. But something weird is going on behind the scenes.

Or maybe Verbitsky just felt nostalgic and wanted to relive his youth days as a guerrilla fighter when he (allegedly) betrayed his comrades to the military.

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Well i guess i went too much into conspiracy theory territory, the explanation was much simpler: a journalist from clarín caught wind of the irregular vaccination scheme and was gonna expose it, so Verbitsky decided to get ahead and expose himself. He is still a snitch though.

Also Carla Vizzotti has been promoted to health minister. Not really a change, she had already taken over much of the official comunication and was the visible face of the ministry during the pandemic, but the government still will present it as a fresh start.

[Cortarán todas las flores, pero jamás detendrán la primavera]

I saw this on youtube and thought to share it here. The particular event happened in october of last year and is old news now, but the larger fenomenom of poverty made worse by the pandemic is still ongoing. A sad but very real look into our current situation.

[Cortarán todas las flores, pero jamás detendrán la primavera]

Interestingly, Formosa is hardly the only province to be run this way.

No other province is run quite like Formosa though (except maybe Santiago del estero, which after a brief period of democratic opening in 2005 has now fallen back safely in the hands of authoritarianism with the Zamoras). Even the other traditionally "feudal" provinces, like San Luis, La Rioja or Santa Cruz have seem some competitivenes at times, specially in recent years, or at the very least have some sort of, let's call it, "renovation", that is, they aren't ruled by the same guy for 25 straight years.                                                               
Insfrán is kinda exceptional in that he has succesfully aquired almost absolute power in his province, in a way no other peronist caudillo has. Ramón Saadi, Carlos Juarez, Carlos Rovira, José Alperovich, they all found obstacles to their projects of full control, usually from within the peronist movement itself. Case in point, just this week Tucuman's governor, Juan Manzur, who was rumoured to be planing a constitutional reform that would allow him to serve a third consecutive term, had a break up with his vicegovernor, Osvaldo Jaldo, who rejects any such amendments (and controls the legislative majorities to block them), and in all likelihood the "jaldist" faction will replace the "manzurist" one in 2023. No such opposition happens in Formosa, Insfran can do whatever he wants without any resistance.

Personally, i believe this protests will fizzle out once Insfran decides to back down and allow bussineses to reopen, and everything will go back to normal. He will probably rule until he retires (or dies), there's no way in hell that the current government betrays their "querido compañero", and i sincerely doubt any future non-peronist president will ever have the balls to intervene the province. An even if a federal intevention took place, it would end up like Santiago del Estero, some other caudillo would eventually took his place, just like Gerardo Zamora took Juarez place. The economic structure of the province (which is based on clientelism and dependency of the state), combined with the tradicional political culture (which is very iliberal and undemocratic), makes it fertile ground for autocrats to appear .
 
I think a good analysis of this come from Carlos Gervasoni, a political scientist who studied this phenomenom extensively:

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In other political news, minister of justice Marcela Losardo is out. She decided to resign because she felt "tired" and "overwhelmed". Probably tired of Cristina Kirchner always publicly critizising her and undermining her work and authority all the time.  
This would be pretty big news, had it not been very obvious that Cristina's least favourite cabinet member wouldn't last very long. Now she'll probably get to appoint the new minister, someone more willing to defend her and denounce all corruption investigations against the vicepresident as politically motivated persecution, as well as fully support whatever reform of the judiciary comes next.
As for Losardo, she'll be designated as the ambassador to the Unesco, because god forbid this people ever stop living off the state.

[Cortarán todas las flores, pero jamás detendrán la primavera]

I can't speak for how likely it is that this leads to Insfrán's downfall but I suspect that for every day the protests continue FdT's prospects worsen nationally.

This whole thing will have exactly 0 impact on the national election. The average argentine isn't paying attention to any of this, he/she is to worried trying to pay bills and buy food with a misery wage, and praying to god vaccines come quickly, that's really the only thing the vast majority care about, not some minor protest in a province most people couldn't even locate on map. Once the media moves on to other stuff, it will fade from memory, and in 6 or 8 months, or whenever elections end up taking place, no one will remember this, not even the formoseños, who will go back to voting for peronism by like 60% or 70%.

Argentines might put up with a certain degree of corruption but surely even Peronists draw the line at policemen chanting slogans about their governor that wouldn't be out of place in a third world dictatorship

I mean, why would they? Ok yes, this particular situation might be a bit too much for some of them, but it's not like peronists aren't always chanting slogans and doing all sort of demonstrations of loyalty to their leaders, it's part of their DNA, cult of personality is one of the cornerstones of peronism, as it is in any populist movement.
Even the more "intelectual" ones, the ones that don't go full "reject liberal democracy, give all power to the leader" mentality, they will still do some mental gymnastics and justify this.

I saw lots of people say that this is a "coup atempt" by the "rural oligarchy", that they're doing this because Insfran stops them from smugling their soy grains to paraguay where they can pay less on export taxes. Which sounds a lot like the "US wants to overthrow Maduro because he won't let them exploit the venezuelan oil" explanation among chavist apologists. Actually the similarities don't stop there, the bolivarian regime is known for drug trafficking, and Formosa is the main port of entry for drugs in Argentina, something that of course requires "aproval" from the provincial government.
In any case, no, peronists don't reject this, never have and never will, from the very begining authoritarianism was part of their ideology, and they won't become champions of democracy now.

In other news, the liberal fronts of Espert and López Murphy have agreed to merge for the upcoming elections. Up until recently there was widespread speculation that López Murphy was going to join with JxC which would have undermined Espert and Milei. This gives Macristas serious reason for concern, since their predominance is almost entirely premised on Argentina's accursed D'Hondt system punishing small vote splitters heavily, but a strong performance from the Liberals (Murphy managed 16% back in 2003's presidential election, though of course the political situation was far different then) would wipe out that justification and potentially shake things up for 2023.

This is a smart move, the only way for liberals to become a serious option for voters (and stop being such a joke) is to have a single, coherent message in a unified and recognizable political force. It's basically what the trotskysts did, yes they still are kind of a meme, but they're doing a lot better than they used to before they formed the Left Front.
Though liberals should only focus on the big provinces, Bs As, CABA, Cordoba, Mendoza, maybe Santa Fe, the rest would be a lost cause and a waste of their time.

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Correct me if I'm wrong but it looks like in Argentina a party that polled strongly in the smallest regions could end up well over the national threshold but below the provincial qualification to the point where in some provinces you could get over 30% of the vote and still get no seat in a supposedly "proportional" system.

Poland also uses D'Hondt and while Poland has some degree of the same issue (PSL won 2% more votes than Konfederacja but ended up winning triple the seats) but as far as I know there aren't any cases of parties literally failing to win seats after crossing the threshold otherwise. I guess it works well for caudillos; is the system intentionally designed like this and why didn't Macri do anything when he had the chance?

There isn't a national threshold. It's like Spain: only provincial-level results matter, so parties with a strong local base (=Peronist caudillos) are naturally advantaged. Case in point: in 2015, Chubut Somos Todos won 0.4%, Progresistas won 2.4% and FIT won 3.9% - yet all of these parties won 1 seat each. Macri didn't really have a chance to do anything about it (he needed those Peronist caudillos too).

I guess caudillos are part of the reason, but fairly strong regionalist sentiments mean that elections have to take place in individual provinces. Plenty of parties were f/cked over by this system historically - all sorts of small left-wing parties that sprung up after 2001, conservative liberals in Ucédé and Acción por la República, Modin (far-right party of crazy coupist general Aldo Rico), or Partido Intransigente back in the 80s. These parties only stood a chance of winning seats in Buenos Aires province, the Capital, and some more anti-Peronist inclined provinces like Santa Fe and Córdoba.

I'm not sure what the solution would be. Huge disparities in population between provinces would mean that just increasing the number of seats wouldn't work, and Argentine politics is quite personalist, so I don't see the appeal of nationwide lists.

We could get rid of the minimum of 5 seats per province, and then update the ditribution of seats acording to the most recent census, something than hasn't been done since 1983. This would reduce the representation of the smaller provinces, but it's absurd that Tierra del Fuego has 1 deputy for every 30.000 people, while Buenos Aires has one for every 200.000. Interior politicians would never allow this to happen though, they would argue unequal representation in the lower chamber is necessary for "muh federalism", as if we didn't already had a senate.

[Cortarán todas las flores, pero jamás detendrán la primavera]

I will note however that in theory if you believe the meme tier polls that have the libertarians polling at 15% or so (which I will admit it is a big stretch); that all kind of implodes much like how it imploded here after 2015.

Yeah, I wouldn't trust those polls, outside of the internet, liberals remain a pretty nieche group. I doubt they'll manage to seriously compete with JxC, if the last three elections are indicative of anything, we seem to be going the opposite route of Spain, we're consolidating into a two-party system (again).

So for Espert's libertarians it will matter a lot whether they are at 15% (which would give them a chance in most of Argentina's provinces), at 10% (which would give them a fighting chance only in the top 7 provinces plus perhaps a couple of particular strongholds in provincial Argentina) or at 5% (which would give them a chance only in CABA, Buenos Aires province, Córdoba and Santa Fe)

This gets accentuated since I imagine the libertarians are only really popular in the rich parts of Greater Buenos Aires and any other big Argentinian cities but not really in rural areas?

Yes, they poll better in the bigger, urban provinces, among the middle and upper class. In rural areas they would only do well (or close to well) in the central part of the country, which tends to vote for non-peronist candidates.

[Cortarán todas las flores, pero jamás detendrán la primavera]

In terms of electoral reform just voting on all legislative seats every election would go a long way towards making the results more representative. A single D'Hondt election with 5 seats at stake is better than two such elections with 3 and 2 seats at stake. Even better would be to increase the number of seats by 50% to somewhat reduce the disproportionate power of smaller provinces and/or to implement a system of MMP like they have in New Zealand or Bolivia.

I know the stereotype is that they only exist in CABA and PBA but both the polls (which, granted, have a bad record in Argentina) and the actual results of Espert last time suggest otherwise.

Looking only at Espert's actual results, CABA isn't even in his top 5 provinces. The first is the southernmost province of Tierra del Fuego where he got 2.8%, though TdF is of course tiny, unrepresentative and populated by penguin researchers. The next three in order are the next southernmost provinces of Patagonia in exact south-to-north geographic order (excluding Santa Cruz which is the single lowest, lol): Chubut (2.4%), Neuquén (2.0%) and Río Negro (2.0%). Then there's Jujuy in the northwest where he picked up 1.92%, beating out his CABA performance of 1.87%. In PBA Espert actually did worse than average, picking up a smaller portion of the vote than in such bastions of liberalism as La Rioja and Salta.

Meanwhile while polls may be unreliable and most don't even record the geographic vote distribution the ones I've seen nearly always put their highest numbers in the North and Patagonia (another example). The only other consistent features are that they perform best with the youngest voters (18-24) and according to JxC's internal polls Espert does best among the upper middle class while Milei's base is made up of youth and lower middle class voters.

I don't really have a great explanation for why that is but the best I can think of is that in provinces where JxC's infrastructure is weak to nonexistent some number of non voters and would-be JxC voters are more willing to vote Espert than in places where "it's Macri or K" is drilled into your head by everyone around you. I've noticed that their strongest denunciations inevitably come from JxC supporters, so it could be that the ceiling and floor are both lower in their best provinces than in places where the opposition is nonexistent.

Of course thanks to the aforementioned electoral system if this actually turns out to be the case then they'll have an absurdly inefficient vote so I'm kind of hoping I'm wrong on this one. If all the votes come from CABA and PBA then vote splitting isn't really a problem, especially in the former.

A new electoral system would be nice, but no one has any interest in it, not even the ones that would benefit from it (like the liberals), so yeah, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

In other news, Fernández went to Chubut to inspect the damage of the recent massive fires across Patagonia (another undercovered news story unfortunately) and on two occasions angry mobs literally hurled rocks at his entourage. Keep in mind this is a province that FdT won with over 50% of the vote.

Chubut is one of the worst run provinces and Arcioni one of the worst governors, i'd be pretty pissed too if i lived there.

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https://twitter.com/Datoworld/status/1383172749183574022

Bullrich-Lusteau, that would be one weird pair and I doubt they'd get along great as they represent completely opposite wings of JxC and they barely agree on anything.
Macri-Vidal may have made some sense in 2015 or 2019, but nowadays I get the sense that Vidal would rather go die in a ditch than being Macri's VP candidate
Amd Maximo would never go against his mother
Who chose those tickets?

Strange pairings indeed, but Larreta- Suárez is one solid ticket. The only con i can think of is the latter not being well known nationally, but outside of that, it would make a lot of sense for Larreta to choose him as a running mate.

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The only thing our politicians never promise us but never fail to deliver is memeable quotes. And this one is great, up there with Menem's "We don't have black people in argentina, that's brasil's problem".

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People are overreacting to the Alberto comment because they really didn’t expect it from him though. I wish there was the same big commotion whenever my president said something scandalous but people treat it as “meh, just another day of shame” and then forget it.

If people (both inside and outside brasil) don't bat an eye whenever Bolsonaro says something outrageous is because we've all come to expect it from him. No one expected Alberto Fernandez, progressive champion of the Americas, to say something so offensive. Hence the drama.

But i'd like to point that this seems to have had different reactions domestically and abroad. Foreigners comment on the racism of it, the underlying reasons for the comment.
Domestically, the theme has been mainly the stupidity of the situation. No one understands his lack of filter, how he didn't stop and thought "wait, this doesn't sound right, maybe i shouldn't say it". Some commentators lamment that this generated a diplomatic embarassment, at such a difficult time, and made us look bad internationally. Most of the reactions were from critics of the government who'll take any oportunity to dragg it throught the mud, many of them see the recent conversion of kirchnerists to political correctnes and progressivenes as insincere "woke bait", and feel validated by this. And of course, a lot of mockers and memers who don't take any of it seriously and have no real interest on serious discussion. Bur very few who try to start a serious debate on racism.

Even kirchnerist (most of whom have simply ignored this and wait for it to go away), the reaction i've heard from the ones i know (including most of my family) is anger at Alberto not for being offensive, but for being stupid, and at his assistants for not advicing him better. Everyone sees this as the latest in a long line of presidential gaffes, little deeper reflection on it. The fundamental racial notions in argentine society, rightfully criticized elsewhere in Latam, remain unchallenged here.

[Cortarán todas las flores, pero jamás detendrán la primavera]

On a different note, UCR is having a mini-crisis at the moment all the time.

FTFY

That particular crisis is over though, the two camps reached an agreement and made peace. Let's see if it lasts.

_{(It won't)}