Primaries (time and) Again Serve Oppositions

Unless Peronist senators can present a more solid front next week than their lower house counterparts, the PASO (Primarias Abiertas Simultáneas y Obligatorias) primaries will be suspended for this year with their total extinction sought by the next Congress if it contains the hugely boosted libertarian presence forecast by almost every pundit. A result rendered even more probable by removal of a mechanism historically favouring the opposition in a world where this century has seen incumbency transformed from a massive advantage to a colossal liability.

One very recent example of a worldwide anti-incumbent trend was the first round of Ecuador’s elections last Sunday – flushed with being one of the select few foreign leaders invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration last Sunday, sitting on an opinion poll lead of up to 15 percentage points in some surveys and having been in power only 15 months to suffer the erosion afflicting almost every government these days, Daniel Noboa (the planet’s youngest president until early this year) could only eke out a 0.23 percent lead over Luisa González, the heiress of three-term leftist president Rafael Correa. Noboa could become a rare case of the currently fashionable anti-system politics backfiring since defining himself as personifying the rejection of all the other parties leaves him looking vulnerable for the April 13 run-off – in particular the indigenous party Pachakutik (a distant third with 5.3 percent of the vote, if the almost nine percent voting blank are excluded) seems far likelier to vote left than right.

Beyond one of South America’s smallest republics, the wider world has not smiled on sitting governments since the pandemic with no less than 40 defeats in 54 elections in the main democratic countries this decade. Nor have even the few survivors emerged unscathed – such entrenched forces as Narendra Modi’s Bharitaya Janata in India and the African National Congress in South Africa continue to govern but the former dropped 120 seats in last year’s elections while the once omnipotent latter was forced into coalition. French President Emmanuel Macron rallied the country against the far right to win re-election in 2022 but only won 28 percent in the first round. The most convincing re-election in this period (Nayib Bukele in El Salvador) was against the Constitution. We could continue but this column’s mission is to focus Argentina, not the world.

Here the PASO primaries now facing elimination have favoured the opposition at more than one level although introduced in late 2009 to tilt the elections the government’s way. The trigger was the late Néstor Kirchner losing the midterms of that year in Buenos Aires Province to Unión-PRO by the slender margin of 2.5 percent when a splinter Peronist list polled 5.5 percent – the main (although not announced) aim of PASO was to insert a preliminary phase of voting to weed out such spoilers ahead of the real thing. PASO worked the first time for a recently widowed Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in 2011, giving her a vote of 48 percent quadrupling her nearest rivals and indeed making the subsequent elections pointless (a syndrome repeated in 2019, which is one of the various arguments against this glorified opinion poll). But since then the only presidential incumbent to win a PASO primary was Mauricio Macri in 2017 and much good it did him because only six months later his administration was in deep financial trouble – the outgoing Peronist government also finished the 2015 PASO on top but then lost power to Macri in the run-off.

The same primary filter introduced to order Peronism has since favoured the opposition because it has helped them to achieve a synthesis equating or at least approximating the natural unity of a government with an elected head, instead of the bewildered fragments now facing up to a rampant libertarian lion without any electoral selection process since the prior formation of the alliances to contest PASO is an integral part of the system. The last PASO primaries in 2023 streamlined no less than 27 presidential hopefuls to five candidates from parties clearing the 1.5-percent threshold – such simplification of the electoral offer is an argument in favour of the mechanism, leading Ricardo López Murphy to question whether its estimated expense of US$200 million is also a net cost.

Aside from the cost, a prime reason for PASO falling into discredit has been a general failure to submit the resolution of internal competition to the electorate, especially among its Peronist authors – most candidates have been picked by party headquarters when not self-appointed instead of giving the citizenry a say in the matter, thus making this preliminary vote unnecessary. The very divisions within the opposition parties have not only made it easier for the government to suspend PASO but have also served to expose that disarray yet further in the process – a prime example would be the hitherto solid Kirchnerite Unión por la Patria caucus disintegrating in the February 6 lower house vote to suspend PASO with almost half voting against while the other quarters voted in favour or abstained.

Introduced little more than 15 years ago for less than noble reasons and widely rejected today with the crudely simple argument that they are a waste of time and money, the PASO primaries will not be missed by many. Their suspension does break with a taboo against changing electoral rules in an electoral year – now that this precedent has been set, will more goal-posts end up being moved? An anarcho-capitalist government seems to be heading into anarcho-capitalist elections – just as PASO was an ex post facto reaction to an election which went wrong in 2009, will a chaotic field of candidates in the October midterms give rise to a new creature in its place?