The number dooming Senator Edgardo Kueider to Upper House expulsion was 211,102 (the sum of the greenbacks in his van crossing into Paraguay from Brazil) but the number on which this column will focus is 383,238 – the number of votes cast by the Entre Ríos electorate to send him to the national parliament in 2019 (as an aside a new verb might be needed for going to the polls because “caste” is being given such a bad name these days).
In other words, this column will leave the central corruption issue to other pundits and nor will it delve unduly into whether the session expelling Kueider was invalidated by Vice-President Victoria Villarruel being acting president at the time (there is some quibbling over the timing of formalities but if this columnist knew well in advance that President Javier Milei was off to Italy for a rightist fest, then surely she did) or whether Kueider was granted his right of self-defence and other procedural guarantees by a kangaroo court. Instead the question will be whether it is only currency contraband which renders him “morally unfit” or whether he is entitled to enter the Senate by virtue of those 383,238 votes entrusted to him as the Frente de Todos Alberto/Cristina candidate in 2019 and then spend much of the past year backing the complete opposite.
As it happens, Kirchnerism made little use of that argument when advancing the motion to ditch Kueider because they were more interested in disowning him as ever a Kirchnerite with government spokesmen so keen on pinning that label on him. But having successfully eliminated one of Milei’s Peronist allies, they are now after another – Senator Carlos Mauricio ‘Camau’ Espinola of Corrientes (watch for Camau to be Milei’s gubernatorial candidate when Corrientes holds its provincial elections next winter, mark these words). Since Espinola is a quadruple Olympic medallist in yachting without Kueider’s skeletons in his closet, Unión por la Patria can find no better argument against him than that he does not vote their way despite having also been elected on a Frente de Todos ticket (in 2021).
Is that argument correct and if not, would that then validate ignoring any loyalty to the party bestowing the seat? It would seem that one must be right and the other wrong but both are flawed.
There are arguments both in favour of and against Kueider deserting his caucus. Back in 2019 everybody knew that Frente de Todos was synonymous with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner who herself anointed Alberto Fernández as presidential candidate in a classic case of the tail wagging the dog who had no more say in the matter than his Collie Dylan – just as in mathematics multiplying anything by zero gives you zero, so in politics multiplying anything with Cristina Kirchner gives you Cristina Kirchner. On this basis everybody voting for Frente de Todos was consciously voting for CFK and thus everybody elected in the name of Frente de Todos owes her blind loyalty. Yet it remains significant that she herself did not stand as presidential candidate as not trusting in victory – the very name Frente de Todos signified an outreach to traditional and alternative strands of Peronism and beyond which those elected under that label were also entitled to represent.
But this issue is not limited to Kueider or Espinola or Kirchnerism because if we turn to Buenos Aires Province, we will find things completely the other way around with libertarian legislators selling out to Peronist Governor Axel Kicillof instead of Peronists to Milei. If La Libertad Avanza elected 13 provincial deputies there in last year’s elections, there is now a splinter called Unión Renovación y Fe with nine deputies who almost invariably vote for Kicillof’s initiatives (La Libertad Avanza has nevertheless recovered to 13 seats by cannibalising PRO legislators). That provincial legislators elected on the coattails of a president saying on the cover of The Economist: “My scorn for the state is infinite” should back such a diehard champion of “El Estado presente” as Kicillof is an absurd and almost obscene anomaly. It is usually explained by the outsider Milei being so short of candidates last year that he had to borrow from his rival Sergio Massa. There is much in this although it is slightly more complex – some of the Massa people are not infiltrators but opportunists spotting a new winner and loyal to the LLA party (for now at least) while some in the pro-Kicillof splinter are not Massa moles but bitterly disenchanted genuine libertarians ejected from their volatile movement.
Crossing party floors has a long history in Argentina and even a name – Lorenzo Bocorotó (a Justicialist candidate in 1996 before switching to Domingo Cavallo’s Acción por la República and elected as a PRO deputy in 2005, only to become almost immediately an ally of the ruling Kirchnerism, a veritable political Vicar of Bray). Argentina is often described as being more Italian than Spanish with the former outnumbering the latter as an ethnic component and these flexi-loyalties can be traced to the ‘trasformismo’ during the six decades of pre-Mussolini unified Italy as perfected by Agostino Depretis – the formation of broad centrist coalitions by constant rotations, usually greased with bribes.
Electoral reform is currently limited to an elimination of PASO primaries not bereft of government opportunism and applying the chainsaw to party financing but a much bolder innovation was among the 664 articles of the original ‘Ley de Bases’ – the replacement of blanket party lists with constituencies so that people can attach a name and a face to their local representatives. This proposal requires deeper discussion – last July’s British elections giving the Labour Party almost two-thirds of the seats with little over a third of the vote is not the best advertisement. The Germans try to balance this with a mixed system where half their parliamentarians are elected in ‘Wahlbezirk’ constituencies and half by proportional representation but the result is a Bundestag of 736 seats in a country with less than twice Argentina’s population. Yet if our parliamentarians are going to be their own men or women, some way must be found of making them fully accountable to their voters.
(The above is the last column of 2024, returning in the New Year. It only remains to wish readers a Merry Christmas and a happy entry into 2025)
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