While nobody is saying so openly, the various political leaders who walk Buenos Aires City’s streets have started to look ahead, with close attention, to next year’s mayoral elections. There are various hopefuls and many moves with divergent strategies.
The ruling PRO party is not looking beyond the re-election of Mayor Jorge Macri. Party leaders argue that the start of his term was complex, mainly because his predecessor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta had not left any public works ongoing at any stage of execution. It was a situation which left the mayor campaigning with nothing to show.
Two years in charge of the capital has modified the situation. Today, there are public works on the way with a consolidated team. That is the analysis of the yellow party, which says a new term is possible, given a divided opposition with weak flanks.
They do not mention it but the Manuel Adorni factor is latent. President Javier Milei’s Cabinet chief was Karina Milei’s favourite to challenge PRO next year under the La Libertad Avanza brand.
The advance of the court cases investigating Adorni’s assets has dealt a harsh blow to his aspirations. The national party head continues to support him but there are voices in La Libertad Avanza asking her to take a look at Senator Patricia Bullrich, the former PRO leader and ex-national security minister now leading the LLA caucus in the upper house.
Firstly, because Bullrich carries her own specific weight by conserving a hard core of voters in the district. Her integration into the libertarian ecosystem positions her as a natural competitor, whether for the purple party or at the head of a coalition. Above all, after her great electoral result last time out – when she won her Senate seat representing Capital Federal with 50 percent of the vote. Meanwhile. Milei’s party is treading every commune and has already launched a school for training leaders to form cadres with libertarian ideas.
Doubt reigns in pan-Peronism. Leandro Santoro appears to be the figure with the greatest capacity to stick Peronists and City progressive sectors together – his numbers in the last local election show that. Although his performance in 2023 permitted him to enter the second round, which he declined, some sectors of Peronism are requesting conversations to assemble a broad alliance bringing together all groupings discontented with Mayor Macri’s administration and far removed from the libertarian proposals. City Partido Justicialista (PJ) chairman Juan Manuel Olmos is one such leader.
To the above should be added the name of Rodríguez Larreta. The ex-mayor has already served notice that he aspires to compete for a comeback under his own party label and is ready to talk to all groupings who want to join his vision of what this city needs. Could Martín Lousteau’s Unión Cívica Radical join in? “It’s a possibility,” commented Lousteau recently.
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