Axel Kicillof will have a month ahead to define his most immediate political future. The closing of lists scheduled for June 24 is marked in red on the governor's agenda. But the freedom of their movements appears increasingly limited: after the final resignation of Cristina Kirchner, the escalation in the K pressure to make the leap to the national fight as a candidate for president seems unstoppable. "A new clamor operation is underway," said an important reference of the Buenos Aires suburbs with a direct line to Máximo Kirchner.
In the camp closest to the deputy and leader of La Cámpora, even, the alternative of a possible castling was raised, with Kicillof as the only candidate in the national race and Eduardo "Wado" de Pedro heading the official offer in the Buenos Aires territory.
That idea embodied with greater force after the one-on-one meeting that Cristina and the governor held last Monday in the Senate, as published exclusively by Clarín, although both chose to silence any comment about whether there was talk about an eventual jump of Kicillof to the presidential dispute.
With the Kirchnerist pressure in the background, close to the governor and among the mayors more aligned with his figure, they accelerated the movements of their campaign for re-election at the same time that they advanced with the analysis of the variables of the possible electoral engineering that they could encourage in the province.
The campaign for the re-election of Axel Kicillof in the Buenos Aires governorship was launched.
Thus, during the weekend the first posters with the legend "Axel 2023 Governor", appeared on the side of the routes and avenues of the suburbs and the interior of Buenos Aires. "Is the Clio coming back?" asked Carlos Bianco, Kicillof's chief adviser in reference to the famous vehicle with which Kicillof toured the province in 2019 as a gubernatorial candidate, asked with irony in his networks.
Other leaders of his environment also replicated the posters in their networks. "The campaign was launched quickly, we will see if it will be the final one," said a community chief worried about the crossings in the definition of the electoral strategy of the Frente de Todos.
At the same time, in the offices of the governor in La Plata they also rushed the consultations in line with their plans to split the Buenos Aires elections from the nationals. "Unfolding is an option. We will see how the candidacies close and what are the best dates to carry out the election," Bianco himself had warned during the week while remarking that Kicillof is "the natural candidate for re-election in the province."
In this analysis, the date that is imposed as the strongest alternative is Sunday, 1 October, that is, three weeks before the national election of 22 October.
For this purpose, the governor relies on Law 5,109 of the Buenos Aires Electoral Code, which in Article 114 establishes that provincial elections, after the PASO (which cannot be separated), can be differentiated from the national calendar.
As already explained by this newspaper, the law determines that the presentation of electoral front in the Province must be made on June 14, while the deadline for the formalization of the candidate lists will expire on June 24. Until that definition is produced, Kicillof will not make any decision on the provincial electoral calendar since he has time until the end of that month. It could only be conditioned by an order from Cristina, which requires her to defend the rags in the national dispute.
That same Buenos Aires electoral code enabled, in its latest reform, the alternative that in the elections for provincial positions the electronic voting system is used. This tool, never used in the district, encouraged some pro-government leaders to propose, as an alternative to splitting, the possibility of replicating in the province the scheme of concurrent elections that Horacio Rodríguez Larreta ordered in the city of Buenos Aires.
It would imply a system of two ballot boxes on the same date as the general elections (October 22): one for national offices and a second, electronic, for provincial candidates (governor, legislators, mayors, councilors and councilors).
However, the idea did not take hold at all near Kicillof, where they warn that the size of the provincial election (compared to the Buenos Aires elections) and the expense of a double ballot box system on the same day would make that alternative impracticable. "It is almost impossible to carry it forward, and even less so with the electoral process already underway," they say in the governor's office.
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