Peronism has eight months ahead at the head of the Casa Rosada.
Everything indicates that it will be a long via cucis.
Divided and without weapons to reverse the worst economic crisis in 20 years, the popularity of its leaders is in tatters.
The negative image of the president, Alberto Fernández, borders on 70%, according to a survey published over the weekend by the consultancy Opina Argentina.
The crisis accelerated this last week and sank the electoral chances of what until now was the main bet of the party, the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa.
The confusion is such that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the government leader with the best position in the polls, has returned to the center of the scene, but has excluded herself from any electoral candidacy since December, when she was convicted of corruption.
Year-on-year inflation is at 104%, the liquid reserves of the Central Bank barely exceed 2,000 million dollars and the peso lost 10% of its value against the dollar since Monday in markets not regulated by the State.
The coup de grace has been given by the drought, the most serious in 60 years.
Export revenues will fall this year by $20 billion, half of what Argentina owes to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Massa has a thankless job: he must avoid a devaluation of the peso that will further trigger hunger and poverty, which in the second half of 2022 reached 39.2%.
The index for the first half of 2023 will be much worse.
The minister's only hope is that the IMF advances the agreed disbursements until December;
The plan to go until December finds Peronism without a candidate for the presidential elections in October.
Alberto Fernández dropped out of re-election on Friday, after Kirchnerism pressured him in every possible way to do so.
But now that he's done it, he has no one to put in his place.
For the first time since the return to democracy, in 1983, Peronism is unable to find the exit door and is putting its management capacity to the test like never before.
The party founded eighty years ago by Juan Domingo Perón has been wearing the Salvadoran badge for 20 years.
In 1989, the recently elected Carlos Menem took office prematurely when the government of the radical Raúl Alfonsín was sinking in the sea of hyperinflation.
In 2001, after the early departure of another radical, Fernando de la Rúa, the Peronist Eduardo Duhalde took charge of the worst economic imbalance in recent history and came out on top.
In 2019, Fernández received from Mauricio Macri an economy with more than 50% inflation and promised to solve the problem.
Four years later he has more than doubled it.
Fernández is undoubtedly the Peronist president with the least power.
Cristina Kirchner anointed him as a candidate in 2018, convinced that she needed a disruptive figure to add the votes of those Peronists who couldn't stand her.
The chess move gave the Frente de Todos victory over Macri, who was seeking re-election, but it soon became profoundly dysfunctional.
As the economy sank, the differences in the presidential binomial widened.
Fernández was left alone and Kirchnerism soon made opposition from within the government itself.
Now they've gotten to the point where they have to find a candidate for president before June, and they don't have a name.
The fight is now about how to choose the successor.
In the video of his resignation, Fernández established himself as the guarantor of an open and transparent primary election in August to vote for a candidate at the polls.
Until now, Kirchnerism had defended the idea of participating in an internal electoral process, but without Fernández in the race, it wants Cristina Kirchner to draw up the strategy of the Frente de Todos.
On Saturday, at a meeting organized in Buenos Aires, Deputy Máximo Kirchner, son of the vice president, said that just as "yesterday nothing was without Perón, today nothing is without Cristina."
In other words, the former president must once again be the only voter and owner of Peronism.
Confusion reigns in Kirchnerism, because Cristina Kirchner has remained up to now in her thirteenth and does not want to be a candidate nor does she give any indication of who hers is chosen for the ballot.
The vice president knows that her chances of winning are minimal, but she also knows that she is the leader within the movement that reaps the most votes.
Peronism is at a crossroads.
If Kirchner is not a candidate, her man is Sergio Massa.
But for this, Massa must at least avoid a catastrophe that even endangers governability.
It is a mystery how Massa would manage to be a minister and a candidate at the same time, asking for the vote while the economy is collapsing.
In that troubled river the figures of anti-politics appear.
The 2001 crisis gave rise to Kircherism, which emerged from the left of Peronism.
Instead, figures like Javier Milei, an economist who promises to end “with the political caste” by closing the Central Bank, dollarizing the economy, and closing ministries such as Education or Social Development, emerge from this crisis.
From the sidelines, Milei is forcing candidates from the opposition Juntos por el Cambio alliance to the right.
Patricia Bullrich, Mauricio Macri's former Security Minister, grows in the polls.
Bullrich has Peronist origins, went through radicalism and is now a fervent macrista.
Her extremist speech complicates the presidential aspirations of the mayor of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, who prefers to campaign from the center of the opposition coalition.
In August the names of the candidates for president of the different parties will be defined.
With Peronism mired in confusion and the opposition fragmented, only Javier Milei has a guaranteed place.
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