The race for the presidential elections next October in Argentina has made the chief of staff, Juan Manzur, step aside.
The veteran Peronist doctor and politician relinquishes his position to Agustín Rossi to return to his province, the northern Tucumán, and dedicate himself to the electoral campaign for the provincial governorship, in which he will compete as a candidate for lieutenant governor in the formula headed by Osvaldo Jaldo.
Rossi will take office on Wednesday, after just over half a year at the head of the intelligence services.
Manzur was elected governor of Tucumán in 2015 and re-elected in 2019, but he took leave of office two years later to join President Alberto Fernández as one of the key figures in the revamped mid-term Cabinet.
He had previously directed the Ministry of Health under the orders of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
His return to Tucumán is part of the Peronist strategy to retain this province, the most populous in northern Argentina and the sixth in the country.
“I want my first words to be to say thank you [to Manzur] for accompanying me all this time;
You did it loyally, with great force, following the slogans of unity, growth and development, to put our efforts so that the Norte Grande comes out of the postponement ”, Fernández said in his last public act.
Rossi, 63 years old, becomes head of the Cabinet as a consensus name among the three main forces of the Peronist Frente de Todos coalition: the justicialismo now led by Alberto Fernández, the kirchnerism headed by the vice president and massismo, which responds to the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa.
Former head of the Kirchnerist bench in the Chamber of Deputies for more than a decade, Rossi also served as Defense Minister during part of Cristina Kirchner's second term.
Despite his closeness to the former president, Rossi has also earned Fernández's trust, which now places him in a position of great public exposure.
He will have to coordinate the management and defend it in the last months of a term in which the president arrives with very low popularity ratings and with an economy hit by inflation of almost 95%.
Rossi must also mediate between the president and his vice president.
The visible differences between the two will have another litmus test on Thursday, with the Electoral Table convened by Fernández.
Cristina Kirchner has already announced that she will not attend and neither will her son, Deputy Máximo Kirchner.
The Minister of the Interior, Eduardo Wado de Pedro, who had an important run-in with the president last week, will go in his place.
Despite all the internal tensions, the ruling coalition has remained unbroken and the dispute over the presidential candidacy remains behind closed doors.
opposition primaries
In the great opposition bloc, Together for Change, the fight for leadership has more and more names.
The mayor of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, and the former Minister of Security Patricia Bullrich, of the Republican Proposal party, were the first to make their candidacy public.
From radicalism, the other great partner of the coalition, the current governor of Jujuy, Gerardo Morales, wants to compete.
Last week they were joined by Elisa Carrió, from Coalición Cívica, the minority party, and it remains to be seen whether former President Mauricio Macri will finally seek a second term after having lost four years ago to Fernández.
The candidates for the presidency will be decided in the open, simultaneous and mandatory primaries that will be held in August.
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