Cristina Kirchner declares herself the victim of a ban

Cristina Fernández greets during the inauguration of the Diego Maradona sports center in Avellaneda (Argentina), on December 27, 2022.PRESS CRISTINA FERNÁNDEZ (EFE)

"Neither resignation nor self-exclusion, there is a ban here," said Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in her first public appearance since she was convicted of corruption on December 6.

That day, minutes after the ruling was read, the vice president of Argentina withdrew from the presidential race in 2023. "I am not going to be a candidate for anything," she said then, and considered herself the victim of a "judicial mafia" that was seeking to remove her. about politic.

This Tuesday, before hundreds of people gathered at the inauguration of a sports center on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, she said that hers was not a voluntary resignation.

“The only resignation that Peronism had was that of Eva Perón [to be a candidate for vice president, in 1951], and here there is no self-exclusion either.

There is a ban,” insisted Kirchner.

Cristina Kirchner kicked the board three weeks ago.

Without her as a candidate, Peronism got involved in an aimless race to find a name that would manage to unify the multiple internal currents that run through it.

The president, Alberto Fernández, even played with the possibility of re-election, despite the fact that his popularity is on the ground and the economic crisis is worsening.

What happened this Tuesday was part of the script with which Kirchnerism accompanied the trial against the former president.

According to his reading, the judges have created, in complicity with the opposition, a "judicial party" whose objective is to imprison popular leaders such as Cristina Kirchner.

The strategy, they maintain, is even regional;

As an example, the more than 500 days that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was imprisoned at the request of Judge Sergio Moro,

This time, however, the Kirchner rally added a new element: before the vice president's speech, the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof, asked her to reconsider her decision not to be a candidate.

"We need you," she told him, at the beginning of what will undoubtedly be, from now on, an operational clamor for her return.

Kirchner, in fact, spoke with a campaign tone.

And he concentrated his attacks on the Judiciary.

“What they did was put together a trial with complaints, with an almost surgical electoral chronology.

After a three-year armed trial, they decided that the oral trial in which they were going to sit me on the defendant's bench was on May 21, 2019. Exactly fifteen days before the deadlines for assembling the electoral fronts where it would be disputed. The presidency.

Three days before I dismantled that maneuver when I announced that we were going to a front with who is president today.

That was a clear proscriptive move,” he said.

For Kirchner, his sentence to six years in prison and perpetual disqualification from holding public office was the consummation of the strategy.

In practice, the vice president is not prevented from being a candidate until the judicial ruling is final before the Supreme Court, a long journey that can take up to eight years.

But the vice president played the ban card, a figure very dear to Peronism.

After the 1955 coup, Juan Domingo Perón went into exile in Spain and could not return to Argentina until 1973. "Perón vuelve" was the battle cry of Peronism during those years of military prohibition.

Kirchner is placed at the height of that feat of the movement.

But unlike Perón, who won the elections comfortably when he returned, the electoral fate of the vice president is not so clear.

Argentina will close this year with inflation above 90% and an economic crisis that has the country on the brink of the abyss.

The World Cup ecstasy barely served to kick the problems forward.

The Government, meanwhile, is already engaged in a new open war against the Supreme Court and the opposition.

Last week, the Supreme Court ordered the Casa Rosada to raise the portion of federal funds received by the city of Buenos Aires, a bastion of macrismo, from 2.32% to 2.95%.

Thus began an unprecedented institutional crisis in democracy, which began in 2016 when President Mauricio Macri increased by decree the capital's items from 1.40% of the total to 3.75%.

It was a political decision to promote Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, his political dolphin and his successor at the head of the Buenos Aires mayor's office.

Supported by 14 governors, Fernández then announced that he would not abide by the Court's ruling.

This week he had already backed off, halfway: he said he would pay, but with Treasuries.

Rodríguez Larreta returned to the charge before the Court.

And Cristina Kirchner got in the way.

"We are facing a legal fact, as if the rule of law had disappeared," she said, and called on the government "to wake up."

It was, of course, a shot by elevation to the president.

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