The outcome of the first round of voting in Argentina's presidential election on April 27 was hardly a surprise--as expected, no candidate received anything like a majority. The country now goes to a runoff on May 18, the first in its history. As the date approaches, the tension and drama are bound to mount. These elections follow what is arguably the most disastrous economic period in the nation's history, worse even than the Great Depression. And they force a choice between two candidates, one of whom is a relatively unknown quantity, the other perhaps a bit too well known for his own good. Once again, as in the recent presidential races in Brazil and Ecuador, outsiders are forced to speculate on whether whoever wins can successfully govern his country.
The First Round
First, however, let us take a closer look at the results themselves. With nearly twenty million Argentines voting, the largest number opted for former president Carlos Menem (24 percent). But following very close behind was Néstor Kirchner (22 percent). Three other candidates, Ricardo López Murphy, Elisa Carrió, and Adolfo Rodríguez Saá, garnered 16, 14, and 14 percent respectively. The remaining 10 percent of the ballots were cast for more than a dozen other personalities, mostly drawn from Argentina's tiny but eternally fissiparous left.
A simple analysis of the numbers helps us to understand the broad preferences of the Argentine electorate. Kirchner and Menem are poles apart ideologically. Throughout the campaign, Kirchner constantly placed the blame for the
economic crisis on the policies pursued during Menem's two presidencies (1989-1999), and Kirchner frontally attacked Menem's "neoliberal" privatizations and alignment with the United States. Perhaps not surprisingly, the latter stoutly defended his record, even promising to pick up where he left off when he left office. López Murphy, a respected economist, could be regarded in some ways as a more responsible and credible version of Menem--at least from the programmatic point of view. Carrió is a flamboyant single mother who combines scarifying anti-establishment (and anti-U.S.) rhetoric with conspicuous Catholic piety (so much so that many voters otherwise attracted to her withheld their vote because of her opposition to abortion); on economics she tilted much farther to the left than Kirchner. Rodríguez Saá, who served for a few days as provisional president in early 2001 following the precipitous resignation of President Fernando de la Rúa, offered a version of old-fashioned boom-and-spend populism (though where the money would come from, nobody could say).
If, then, one tallies up the crude ideological scores represented by these candidates, the outcome of the runoff is relatively easy to anticipate. Roughly 40 percent of the electorate is center-right, while slightly more than 50 percent is located left of center (more than that if one adds on the 5 percent that went to small leftist groupings, and the 2 percent that went to the candidate of Argentina's venerable, center-left Radical Party). Further, taking into account the fact that Menem has the highest negatives (57 percent) of any politician in Argentina, Kirchner is almost certain to win the runoff later this month and take office on May 25, the scheduled date for inauguration. This presumption is underscored by no less than eleven different surveys taken the day after the election--one, produced by the highly respected pollster Enrique Zuleta Puceiro, giving Kirchner as much as 59 percent to Menem's expected 24.[1] What his victory will mean for Argentine politics and economics, however, is far more difficult to predict.
Who is Kirchner?
Relatively unknown until quite recently, Néstor Kirchner was born in 1950 and has been in politics for most of his adult life. By training a lawyer, he was elected mayor of the southern city of Santa Cruz in 1991 and served as governor of the province by the same name from 1991 to 1999. (His wife continues to represent it in the federal senate.) During the campaign he made much of the fact that Santa Cruz prospered mightily during his tenure in office, but in fact this was due to its abundant oil and gas, two commodities traded internationally in hard currency. Kirchner also had the perspicacity to transfer most of the province's dollar earnings to foreign banks before the massive devaluation of the peso in early 2001.
Kirchner was plucked from relative obscurity to be the official candidate of retiring president Eduardo Duhalde, who took office by vote of congress in early 2001 and had pledged not to attempt to succeed himself. Without question Kirchner's relatively impressive showing in the first round is attributable to the efforts and resources put behind his campaign by his patron, particularly in the province of Buenos Aires, by far the country's largest and most populous. Indeed, without Duhalde's backing there and in one or two other places, Kirchner's relatively favorable showing would have been restricted to the relatively unpopulated provinces in Argentina's south. (Santa Cruz itself--a territory roughly the size of Florida, is home to a mere 200,000 people.)
As if to underscore his innate weaknesses as a candidate, Kirchner is notably short on charisma, a quality on which Argentine voters tend to set much store. Rather remarkably considering what the country has been through recently, in a poll published a few days before the election Kirchner came in a distant third (7 percent) when people were asked which candidate was best qualified to run Argentina's economy (Dr. López Murphy, 60 percent; Menem, 12 percent). Presumably this disability was neutralized by the warm endorsement of Duhalde's finance minister Ricardo Lavagna, widely credited with having put an end to the free-fall of the Argentine economy. (It will actually grow this year by at least 3 percent.) The fact that Kirchner has incurred a huge political debt to President Duhalde does not necessarily mean that if elected he will be a mere puppet of the outgoing president--a charge Menem is already making--though he has said that he would favor Duhalde's people for major cabinet appointments.
A more striking contrast with Kirchner than former President Menem is hard to imagine. At seventy-two, this is clearly his last campaign. A scion of one of the leading Syrian-Argentine families of the impoverished Argentine northwest, he too has been a politician virtually since he left law school, serving as governor of La Rioja province both before and after a particularly savage period of military dictatorship (1976-1983). Elected president in 1989, Menem broke all the rules of Argentine politics, including the most important of all--he had the constitution changed so that he could run for consecutive terms. (He was reelected by a large majority in 1995). He also reversed a half-century of corporatist economic policies, privatizing more than 300 state enterprises, including state oil company, telephones, railroads, and the national airlines. He established a currency board that pegged the Argentine peso to the U.S. dollar. He also uninhibitedly scrapped Argentina's long-standing "neutralist" or "nonaligned" posture in foreign affairs, becoming the closest and firmest ally of the United States in the region.
Without doubt Menem reversed a long period of economic decline in Argentina, if only temporarily. But his administration was also associated with a get-rich-quick ethos and shadowed by constant accusations of corruption and payoffs, particularly in connection with massive privatizations. After leaving office the former president was briefly placed under house arrest in connection with alleged illegal sales of arms to Croatia and Ecuador, and an Iranian defector accused him of accepting $10 million to cover up a terrorist attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. He also currently faces charges that he controls a pair of illegal (undeclared) Swiss band accounts. He denies all three accusations.
The runoff is likely, therefore, to be a kind of plebiscite on how Argentines feel about the Menem years. In different ways this suits both candidates. The former president is expected to evoke nostalgia for the golden days gone by, a sentiment to which Argentines are particularly susceptible, and to elicit which he can produce impressive (if necessarily selective) evidence. (One of his major slogans is "Under Menem We Lived Better.") He also benefits from the perception that he knows how to take tough decisions. As one shoe-shine man told the New York Times (April 20), "he is a scoundrel and a thief. But he is the only one capable of running this country."
For his part, Kirchner places all the country's troubles at Menem's door. During the nineties, he reminds his countrymen, "everything was imported without protection for Argentine employment," leading to the "collapse of national industry." With unemployment running (officially) at nearly 25 percent and many parts of the country experiencing real poverty for the first time, this message is bound to find great resonance. While other candidates farther to the left rail against capitalism and globalization, Kirchner has cleverly positioned himself as both a critic of the system and as one who can work within it if necessary. (In this regard he resembles the current version of President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva in neighboring Brazil, a leader highly regarded these days in Argentina.)
The End of the Party System
Regardless of who wins, this election has proven a watershed in at least one important respect: it surely marks the end of Argentina's two-party system, formerly one of the most durable in Latin America. The candidate of the Radical Civic Union, the country's oldest party and second political force for more than fifty years, garnered less than 3 percent of the votes. In all probability the Radicals will never again be competitive nationally. But ironically the election also spells the end of the Peronist Party--the country's largest--as a unified and disciplined organization, so disciplined indeed that its top-down style of leadership was often referred to as "ultra-verticalist." Because of an inability to agree on procedures for selecting a single candidate this time (masking serious rivalries between Presidents Duhalde and Menem), in effect the Peronist primary and the general elections were held all at once. Instead of one Peronist candidate in the general elections there were three--Menem, Kirchner, and Rodríguez Saá. Thus while the next president is bound to be a Peronist, one could argue that the label itself has become meaningless, since he will face a congress split into more than twelve minority voting blocks. If he expects to govern effectively, he will have to engage in furious horse-trading even with politicians nominally belonging to his own party. As if to complicate matters, elections for governors and provincial legislatures will not take place until November.
Looking for the Silver Lining
In some ways, nonetheless, this election gives reason for modest optimism. In the first place, roughly 80 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots for one of the candidates. This stands in sharp contrast to the legislative elections two years ago, in which 40 percent abstained or cast blank ballots. (As in many Latin American countries, voting in Argentina is obligatory; those who dislike the candidates on offer deposit unmarked ballots in the box.) A mere eighteen months ago most Argentine politicians were afraid to show themselves in public, and the most popular slogan was "Out with all of them!" (Que se vayan todos!) How irrational, how incompetent, how hopeless can a people be when--after enduring a catastrophic drop in their standard of living and their life prospects--they are still willing to go to the polls and vote in an atmosphere of relative calm? The contrast with the Argentina of yesteryear--where only two elected presidents finished the terms for which they were elected--is striking.
Some credit for this must go to President Duhalde, who managed to reestablish an atmosphere of calm after his predecessor (Rodríguez Saá, president for five days) had frozen bank accounts and devalued the peso, in effect expropriating the country's large and politically influential middle class--the largest single such example in any Western country since the Russian Revolution.
Moreover, it appears that at some level Argentines have come to terms with a few harsh new realities. As pollster Felipe Noguera puts it, the public mood has shifted from rage to apathy to acceptance. "The illusion that we were on our way to becoming a First World nation is dead," he adds.[2] Meanwhile, thanks to devaluation of the Argentine currency, the country's trade balance (half of it represented by agricultural exports) has improved. The Argentine government has announced that it will end a freeze on bank savings accounts, releasing roughly $5.5 billion to Argentine households--a sign that the four-year recession is ending. Indeed, in late March the peso rose to its highest level against the dollar in a year.
To be sure, Argentina can no longer live on agricultural exports alone. Its population is more than three times the size it was in the golden years of the 1940s. Nor can the inefficiencies of its economy be periodically compensated by indiscriminate foreign borrowing or reckless devaluations, as was often the case in the past. Putting as positive a construction on these facts as possible, one cannot but feel sympathy with and apprehension for whoever finishes first on May 18.
Notes
1. Pagina 12 (Buenos Aires), April 30, 2003.
2. Business Week, April 28, 2003.
Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at AEI.
