On Tuesday, with her eyes moist with emotion, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner vehemently closed her repudiation of the six-year prison sentence she had just received for corruption.
It was then that she dropped, without warning, a political bombshell.
“I am not going to be a candidate for anything, neither for president, nor for senator,” she said.
In case the surprise had clouded the understanding of some, she insisted: “My name will not be on any ballot.
I finish on December 10 [of 2023] and I return, as I returned on December 10, 2015 [when she finished her second term], to my house ”.
Kirchner, the most loved and hated politician in Argentina, has just excluded herself from the race for the October 2023 general elections.
The announcement, unexpected, was a shell to the waterline of Peronism.
While the Highway cause advanced, and the evidence of an embezzlement of 1,000 million dollars from the treasury was added, the clamor for a presidential candidacy for Kirchner grew little by little.
The popularity of the president, Alberto Fernández, is on the ground.
And the candidacy of Sergio Massa, the Minister of Economy, depends dangerously on the course of the crisis and a drop in inflation, now close to 100%.
If Cristina Kirchner keeps her promise - lest it be the result of the emotion of the moment - a long battle for the succession opens in Peronism.
Massa, who never hid his presidential aspirations, is joined by at least two names with their own weight: that of the Minister of the Interior, Eduardo de Pedro;
and that of the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof.
Both are figures from the closest environment to the vice president.
Without Kirchner's organizing stick, the campaign for the presidency is moving forward.
Why did Cristina drop out of the race?
The sentence is not firm and nothing prevents her from being a candidate.
It is possible that she simply decided to redouble the bet.
The vice president is convinced that they want to ban her.
She thus put herself on a par with Juan Domingo Perón, annulled from politics between 1955 and 1973 by the military coup.
Now, she said, it is not the uniformed officers who decide who may or may not be candidates, but what she calls the "judicial party."
This Tuesday she went a step further and spoke of "judicial mafia" and "parastatal power".
She placed behind the federal judges who investigate the causes of corruption, the opposition linked to former President Mauricio Macri and the big media.
"Prey or dead they want me," she said.
And she recalled that, on September 1, a man shot her twice in the head, without the bullet coming out of it.
After that failed attack, an operational clamor grew.
Those same militants who then chanted her name in the streets and promised “quilombo” if they “touch Cristina”, must now adjust to a new political reality.
So should the opposition, traversed as it is by deep internal divisions.
If Kirchner leaves the electoral map, the polarization will be reduced and the options of the center will be strengthened.
The mayor of the city of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, is waiting there.
Meanwhile, the options most leaning to the right of the opposition coalition, such as Mauricio Macri's or his former Security Minister, Patricia Bullrich, are weakening.
The judges who sentenced Kirchner said in a preview of the grounds for the ruling that they found evidence of "an extraordinary fraudulent maneuver that harmed the pecuniary interests of the national public administration."
According to prosecutor Diego Luciani, in charge of the prosecution, the total defrauded from state coffers amounted to 1,000 million dollars during Kirchner's two terms, between 2007 and 2015. Throughout the trial, Luciani detected irregularities in the awarding of 51 road works in the province of Santa Cruz, the Patagonian bastion of Kirchnerism.
The beneficiary of the maneuver was Lázaro Báez, a builder friend of the Kirchner family who this Tuesday added six years in prison to the 12 he already has for money laundering.
They did not consider proven, however, the figure of the illicit association, created to combat drug trafficking mafias.
From the opposition they spoke of a light of hope in the fight against state corruption, thanks to a ruling that they considered exemplary.
They must now capitalize on this enthusiasm at the polls.
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