City elections 2025: The great debate

The two main electoral stories of the week crisscross in the sense that one can be said to be the consequence of the other – we had the absurd multiplicity of 17 list-heading candidates for the 30 City Legislature seats in Tuesday night’s debate because of the suspension of PASO primaries, which was also confirmed for Buenos Aires Province by its Senate the previous day.

The 12 men and five women (it should have been six but the FIT leftist and 2023 mayoral candidate Vanina Biasi was stricken with pneumonia) competing for an electorate of just over three million can be broken down into five main subgroupings.

Directly bidding for the almost half the vote won by incumbent PRO City Mayor Jorge Macri in 2023 are the deputy Silvia Lospennato (Buenos Aires Primero) most directly representing him and two other women representing the other strands of the now extinct Juntos por el Cambio coalition – Lucille ‘Lula’ Levy of Evolución (Unión Cívica Radical) and Paula Oliveto of the Coalición Cívica founded by Elisa Carrió. But the strongest contender for that vote is the mayor serving the two terms between Mauricio and Jorge Macri: Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (Volvamos Buenos Aires).

Also primarily interested in that half of the vote (although not exclusively since polling strongly in the more Peronist South Side of the City) are the libertarians, who account for no less than five candidates. Their official candidate is the official Presidential Spokesperson Manuel Adorni running under the La Libertad Avanza label. But a certain detritus is the inevitable result of any outfit orchestrated by Presidential Chief-of-Staff Karina Milei and four other candidates fly libertarian banners – first and foremost, the 2023 mayoral candidate Ramiro Marra (expelled and now UCeDé), but also Ricardo Caruso Lombardi (of the nationally ruling coalition’s partners Movimiento de Integración y Desarrollo, or MID), Yamil Santoro (Unión Porteña Libertaria) and Mila Zurbriggen (who quit the party last September and, apart from being explicitly geared to youth at the age of 26, seems closer to the nationalism of Vice-President Victoria Villarruel than the anarcho-capitalism of Javier Milei).

Three more candidates vie for the Peronist vote of almost a third won by Leandro Santoro for Unión por la Patria in 2023 – Santoro himself (the ex-Radical now rebranded as Es Ahora Buenos Aires), former Cabinet chief Juan Manuel Abal Medina (Seamos Libres, allied with the picket movement Movimiento Evita but primarily allergic to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) and Alejandro Kim (bearing Korea’s most common surname and running for the Principios y Valores of Guillermo Moreno in a much slicker version than its founder).

Biasi was replaced by Luca Bonfanto (second on the FIT list) but the left was also denied unity with Federio Winokur claiming to represent it (La Izquierda) in the name of the chronic maverick Manuela Castañeira –Winokur called for a minimum wage of two million pesos and a default with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as if either were within the City Legislature´s purview. Bonfanto prided himself on participation in the marches for public education and pensioners.

No further mention is required of either the left or the remaining three candidates beyond listing them – César Biondini (Frente Patriota Federal, son of the neo-Nazi Alejandro Biondini but apparently a national socialist in a less Nazi sense), Marcelo Peretta (Movimiento Plural, obsessed with the price of medicine) and Eva Koutsovitis (Confluencia, a civic action voice opposed to various development projects pursued by business interests) – even if some of them may be closer to municipal issues than the main candidates.

Instead these 17 lists can be boiled down into a triangle of the PRO, libertarian and Peronist blocs although this does not necessarily translate into only three candidates since others like Rodríguez Larreta (vowing to clean up a “dirty” city) and Marra (strong against crime) stand to make inroads. These inroads will not automatically be within these blocs – thus Rodríguez Larreta is widely viewed as damaging Jorge Macri but who is to say that he might not channel away votes of the dissatisfied from Santoro or Adorni? The opinion polls (at which this column will not be looking until closer to the date) offer a variety of results which in any case will be relative with City Hall itself not at stake – thus Santoro could conceivably win with considerably less than his 2023 vote.

Returning to the debate, it was much ado about almost nothing with nobody having more than two minutes at a time – the multiplicity of voices and the rigid format hindered much in the way of meaningful interchange. Plenty of cheap shots but the question-and-answer session occupying around half of the three-hour debate was largely wasted – a rare case of a penetrating question, when Caruso Lombardi asked Adorni when his government proposed fully restoring to the City the federal revenue-sharing funds purloined by the Alberto Fernández presidency, went completely unanswered. The gratuitous nationalisation of this municipal legislative election obtruded unduly – in particular, Adorni, who carried the “chainsaw” to the extremes of proposing the elimination of his Canal de la Ciudad television host, had little to propose at municipal level beyond being the voice of Milei, leading his Peronist rival to say: “Santoro is Santoro” (to which the presidential spokesman retorted by saying that this suggested being ashamed of everybody else in the party). Typical of the evening.

Attempts to polarise what is something more than a three-pronged race generally failed to prosper. Scenarios of all 16 opposition candidates ganging up against a Lospennato representing a PRO City Hall eroded by four terms in office failed to materialise with Santoro more under fire if anything as Adorni aimed against Kirchnerism. Municipal issues were the orphan of the debate – Lospennato proposed lowering taxation for those over 50 along with preferential mortgages for youth under 35 while Yamil Santoro boasted authorship of 100 bills without going into much detail but few serious proposals. The main Santoro was more interested in criticising a “cruel” Milei and “indifferent” Jorge Macri than making proposals beyond investigative commissions into City Hall’s business contracts. The lesser candidates almost invariably underlined their disassociation from the failures of the past while boasting a lack of coaching and marketing (an Oliveto insistent against corruption) – a boisterous Caruso Lombardi referred to Fernando Gago being shown the door in Boca Juniors after one defeat in contrast to politicians.

This journalist’s notes on the debate would fill a page and a half of this newspaper but not much worth repeating. More on the City race in the remaining fortnight but there are also four provincial elections next weekend to be previewed.