The midterms are now only a fortnight away and the electorate has yet to be offered something for which to vote between a government with plummetting credibility and a populist ideology with a track record of decades of decline, along with an excess of other options freed from any PASO primary filter. The warcries on both sides of “libertad o kirchnerismo” and variations on stopping President Javier Milei both appeal to negative voting. To that should be added the prospects of random voting from the unknown factor of the innovative single paper ballot – if G.K. Chesterton said that people who believe in nothing end up believing in anything, the systematically sceptical Argentine confronted with the bewildering kaleidoscope of the single ballot could equally end up voting for anything (with most pollsters forecasting no more than 70 percent for the two main forces). But the biggest unknown in these midterms is surely how many citizens are going to turn out to vote in the first place.
If Robbie Burns wrote: “There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing,” the upcoming election remains open despite an uninterrupted run of government disasters in the past five weeks yet these should not be underestimated. The downfall of José Luis Espert might have been limited to the man rather than the movement despite his individual importance (Congress Budget Committee chairman and top candidate in the country’s most populous district, Buenos Aires Province) had it not come on top of other scandals starting with the ‘$LIBRA’ cryptocurrency scam back in February through to those voice messages pointing to the extortion of bribes in the purchase of medicaments for the disabled – once might be an accident but twice looks like carelessness (with three a pattern), to paraphrase Oscar Wilde.
Moreover, things are only going from bad to worse with Espert’s replacement – quite apart from the unholy mess of reprinting 14.3 million ballots, Milei has run into problems with his clumsy bid to impose PRO’s Diego Santilli over the second on the La Libertad Avanza list, Karen Reichardt (real name Karina Vázquez), hostess of a television programme for dog-lovers and former starlet with a string of racist tweets to her name whose only asset is whether there is a continued appetite for outsiders. Everything points to an even bigger Peronist landslide in Buenos Aires Province than last month but a reversal of fortune could also lie in the very dimensions of the triumph – Isaac Newton’s third law tells us that action and reaction are equal and opposite, perhaps leading voters to step back in fear after seeing the market mayhem triggered by last month’s government debacle. Or will an election date only five days away from the end of the month prove decisive with almost two-thirds of households complaining about not reaching the end of the month?
The midterm voting is on October 26 but the markets vote every day – now the biggest headache for a market-friendly government. With voters taking Milei’s electoral trump card of reduced inflation and sustained fiscal surplus for granted for some months now, hopes surged of a new Trump card from Washington with pledges of a US$20-billion currency swap, guaranteed bond purchases and “whatever it takes” but Donald Trump has yet to send in the cavalry to salvage the exchange rate with shutdown in Washington lengthening the odds against, despite Economy Minister Luis Caputo devoting his entire week to negotiations there with no result when this editorial was written – Argentina’s country risk remains in four digits. And yet against all the odds that Trump card might still come through in the next fortnight.
The key to escaping this welter of negative voting lies in producing constructive alternatives and here the onus mainly lies on the opposition with their failure on this front perhaps giving the disaster-stricken libertarian administration its main lifeline – a poverty of alternatives boosted by the fragmentation mirrored by the single ballot with even the Fuerza Patria so rampantly triumphant in Buenos Aires Province last month more divided than it looks, not to mention Peronism nationwide.
If so much has happened in the last five weeks, the pace could accelerate in the next fortnight, leaving open an election which nobody can win in any case with no overall Congress majority within reach for anybody. No signs of any reversal of the government’s downward slide but in past elections the popular vote has made a point of confounding the pollsters and the media. Let us see what next week brings.
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