Argentine President Mauricio Macri speaks at the World Economic Forum held in Davos (Switzerland) on January 25, 2018. LAURENT GILLIERON (efe)
In October 2023, Argentines will elect a new president.
Peronism has the losing side.
The economic crisis hampers their chances of victory and the realization of agreements.
The president, Alberto Fernández, has not spoken for months with his vice, Cristina Kirchner, helmsman of the group that is the majority within the Frente de Todos, the coalition that has governed Argentina since 2019. The house is not in order and the election of a consensus candidate for the presidential elections is today a chimera.
The opposition fishes in that troubled river, convinced that it is a few steps from the Casa Rosada.
That is why the internal fights are fierce: whoever is a candidate will most likely be president.
The spectacle is especially sad in the PRO, the party of President Mauricio Macri.
This week, the former Minister of Security Patricia Bullrich threatened to “fuck the punches” to the chief of staff of the mayor of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta.
The fight was public and was recorded, evidence that the forms had been lost.
Bullrich is on the far right end of the PRO;
Rodríguez Larreta tries to be a center option.
There is a third in discord: the former governor of the province of Buenos Aires, María Eugenia Vidal, Macri's political dauphin.
Meanwhile, the former president enjoys the show, without clarifying whether or not he will finally be a candidate for president.
The video of a former minister berating a high-ranking Larreta official ended up frightening the PRO leaders.
A line had been crossed and it was necessary to reorder the troops.
On Tuesday, the main leaders of Macri's party met in Buenos Aires and signed a truce.
It was actually a series of rules of coexistence: the fights would no longer be public, because they had a bad image and scared the electorate.
"We have established a coordination mechanism between the PRO candidates to avoid unnecessary tensions," the party later said in a statement.
The president of the block of macrista deputies in Congress, Cristian Ritondo, acted as spokesman for the meeting.
"Our candidates for president are Rodríguez Larreta, Bullrich and Vidal," he told reporters.
He did not name Macri.
That Macri was missing from the list triggered all kinds of speculation.
Had he finally decided to back out of the fight?
He did not get off, because he never got on, was the argument that was spread around him.
He thus left the door open to a candidacy.
The lack of definition gives the former president time to analyze the political panorama when there are still 11 months left for the elections.
There is, for now, no operational clamor: Macri has a negative image of 47%, according to the latest survey by the Giacobbe Public Opinion consultancy.
The three remaining candidates will wait their turn to launder their presidential aspirations, while fighting as if they were already officially.
The internal opposition has its mirror in the Government.
The president, Alberto Fernández, let it be known that he will seek re-election and stirred up his relationship with Kirchnerism.
"He thinks more of himself than of the people and of Peronism," Andrés Larroque, a high-ranking official from the province of Buenos Aires who is the voice of Cristina Kirchner in the media, shot at him.
The fight escalated when the president opposed a request from Kirchnerism to eliminate the simultaneous and mandatory open primaries (PASO) with which the parties will choose their candidates for the October elections in August.
If Fernández finally decides to fight for re-election, he will be able to resolve his differences with Kirchner at the polls, in that appointment prior to the final challenge.
Kirchnerism tried to repeal the PASO in Congress, but this week it admitted that they no longer had the legislative time to do so and withdrew the project from discussion.
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