The Supreme Court of Justice, the division of Peronism and a candidate with more local than national anchorage. In the ruling party, they appealed to different arguments to relativize the impact of the triumph of Marcelo Orrego over Jose Luis Gioja and Ruben Uñac, brother of the governor, the PJ candidates, whose hegemony comes to an end after two decades.
Unlike what the opposition proposes after its victories in Chaco and San Luis, in the Government they do not believe that the result of this Sunday is a foretaste of what can happen at the national level and warn that different variables influenced the development of the elections. The main one, according to the three main sectors of the coalition, was what Casa Rosada considered an "interference of the Court" with a ruling in which "the current governor was prevented from being a candidate in a process that was already underway, days before the vote was taken."
This despite the fact that in the elections of May 14, when the new governor was originally to be elected but finally only the legislative and local positions were voted, the PJ obtained more than 50 percent of the votes against 36% of JxC and won in 15 of the 19 municipalities.
The first to expose this discursive line, which was not agreed among the most important referents of the coalition but on which there is agreement, was the cabinet chief and pre-candidate for vice president, Agustín Rossi. "Undoubtedly, the ruling of the Court preventing the candidacy of Sergio Uñac and making the decision of the governor himself to convene on the date that the elections were scheduled the rest of the categories, except that of the governor and vice, seems to have had some kind of impact," he said.
Rossi, who supports Sergio Massa in the ticket, opted to minimize the impact that the result will have in the face of the presidential election. "I understand that it is simply a bad step that we have had, nothing more, but that clearly when the people of San Juan have other possibilities they will vindicate those who introduced a substantial change in the province," he said in a campaign key.
The division of Peronism was another aspect that was highlighted by all sectors of the coalition. Especially in the massismo, whose space pushed until the last moment so that there was a list of unity for the presidential contest. "This is what Sergio has been saying since last year: if we are divided, we all lose. Where there was unity, Peronism came out stronger," reflected a member of the circle of confidence of the pre-candidate for president.
The curious thing is that Rossi himself climbed into this proposal, one of those who claimed, together with President Alberto Fernández and Daniel Scioli, the realization of the PASO to settle internal differences. "The law of Slogans made it possible for the differences between Gioja and Uñac to occur within the same coalition and that finally the result of both ended up adding up. Now certainly every time Peronism is divided in an electoral process offers advantages. He is a mathematician. It offers an advantage that sometimes despite having a very strong political option also makes that initial advantage is diluted, "he said on Radio Perfil.
In Kirchnerism, which underpinned the return to power of José Luis Gioja, they blamed the division on the outgoing Uñac for his decision to anoint his brother Rubén, after the Court's ruling. "After the Court's ruling, a gesture of greatness was needed that did not come. Making Peronism differentiating itself from Cristina never ends well, "launched, with acidity, a leader who pays tribute at the Instituto Patria and recalls the tensions that characterized the link between the San Juan governor and Christianity in recent years.
However, in the face of the elections in Santa Fe, which will be held on July 16 and where Peronism is exposed to another defeat, in the Government they write down another argument to circumscribe what happened in San Juan: that there was a candidate like Orrego, almost without knowledge at the national level but with strong territorial roots.
"Orrego won because he did not walk through the Buenos Aires news channels, he did not play the crack, he walked the province and offered a clearer proposal for the people of San Juan than we proposed. Nothing more," summarized an important official close to the president.
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