Cristina Kirchner did not participate this Tuesday in the national congress of Peronism, but she was once again the center of their discussions. While hundreds of members of the Justicialista Party clamored in a Buenos Aires stadium for her to run for the presidential elections in October, the Argentine vice president has confirmed once again that she will not seek to be a candidate. “I already said it on December 6, 2022. I am not going to be a pet of power for any candidacy,” the former president (2007-2015) wrote in a letter published on her social networks. Kirchner, who has been asked by her militants for months to return to lead a Peronism without other referents in the elections, has justified her decision by blaming a political use of Justice, which last December sentenced her to six years in prison and disqualified for life to hold public office for corruption.
Kirchner, 70, is not disqualified from participating in the October elections. The sentence of the federal judge who read his sentence on December 6 for alleged irregularities in the awarding of 51 road works in the province of Santa Cruz, the Patagonian bastion of Kirchnerism, is not final and there are still appeals. But the former president has encouraged the theory since that day that her political rivals, the opposition media and federal judges want to prevent her from being a candidate to eliminate Peronism from the electoral race. “The conviction and disqualification in said cause has a single political and electoral translation: the proscription”, she has written in her letter addressed to her militancy. “As I have been arguing for a long time, it is not just about the banning of a person, but about Peronism.”
The letter published by the vice president has been a new bucket of cold water for the ruling Peronism as it races against the clock. According to the last poll of the Latin American Strategic Center for Geopolitics (CELAG), the ultra-right leads the intention to vote in the first round with 29.3%, and 77% of the population negatively evaluates the management of the current Peronist government. The president, Alberto Fernández, resigned to run for re-election at the end of April to prioritize that the militants choose a candidate in the open primaries, but the ruling coalition has not yet given any signs of defining.
The vice president has repeated in the few public interventions since her conviction that she does not want to be a candidate, but a large part of the hopes of the Peronist militancy rested on her taking the reins to unite her party which, according to the CELAG study, maintains 26 .1% of voting intention divided into at least six candidates. “We must be intelligent to get out of this labyrinth and break the trap into which they want to lead us: that we have a candidacy prohibited by the Judicial Party,” warned the vice president in her letter released this Tuesday.
Runaway inflation, which last April reached 108.8% year-on-year, is just one of the government’s problems. The president and vice president stopped talking almost a year ago and the management of the Government has come to depend on the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, who also heads the third leg of the ruling coalition. Despite the fact that inflation has begun to chain unprecedented marks since the corralito crisis in 2001, Massa is still one of the strong cards that the Government maintains to stand in the elections. But he does not unleash passions. Monthly inflation had already broken its own record in March with 7.7%, and it will surely do so during May, when the impact of the run against the peso that at the end of April triggered dollar prices in financial markets is measured. . The index has not stopped rising for six months and the few chances of Massa being the unit’s candidate vanish as the double-digit shadow looms for May.
The congress of the Justicialista Party concluded with the ratification of its national authorities in a meeting that ended in an anecdote after the letter from Cristina Kirchner. The resignation of the vice president, together with that of Alberto Fernández and former president Mauricio Macri, who also gave up running last March while the leaders of his party fight to head his list, opens an unprecedented panorama in Argentina. No referent of the last 20 years will fight for the presidential elections.
The opposition has celebrated the final resignation of the vice president from the elections. From the libertarian extreme right, they take it as a missed opportunity to “see it third” in the elections; from the coalition led by macrismo as “a door to the necessary renewal of politics.” Peronism, meanwhile, still clings to one last decision from its leader. On May 25, when Argentina celebrates its independence, Cristina Kirchner will once again lead a public act. The great resignation against the militancy is already off the table.
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