The theme of the week has been Presidential Chief-of-Staff Karina Milei making the most of being the perceived architect of last month’s surprising midterm victory by replacing Cabinet Chief Guillermo Francos with City legislator-elect Manuel Adorni and generally looming as more of a Big Brother than her big brother. Rather than add to the superabundant analysis of the Cabinet changes, ex-president Mauricio Macri’s peeves and “Kremlin wizard” Santiago Caputo’s future, this column proposes to challenge the underlying premise of her quantum leap in empowerment – her claim to the electoral laurels.
That claim would seem to be a slam dunk given that the midterms were won against almost all expectations except hers in general and in Buenos Aires Province in particular after September’s catastrophe at provincial level. Seemingly a total vindication of her “purple or nothing” strategy demanding unconditional surrender by all allies and leading to La Libertad Avanza (LLA) being the only label running in every district but the devil lies in the details and a different conclusion emerges once we look beyond the big picture to the provincial results.
Karina’s purism led to LLA flying solo in exactly half the 24 districts, while having some kind of partnership in the other dozen, so it might be an interesting mathematical exercise to average out and compare the libertarian percentage in the two categories. In the provinces with splendid isolation LLA averaged 33.6 percent of the vote (only topping 40 percent of the vote in Córdoba, La Rioja and Santa Fe) whereas in the districts where there was agreement with the local administration and/or centre-right parties the average was 43.5 percent (topping 50 percent in Entre Ríos, Mendoza and San Luis). The latter province arguably had the smartest electoral strategy of them all – a non-aggression pact instead of either going it alone or coalition since the libertarians stayed out of the way when San Luis voted provincially on May 11, while the provincial government played no role in last month’s national midterms.
Many people seem to have forgotten that at the start of the year a virtually unopposed government heroically slaying the inflationary dragon seemed on course for perhaps the biggest midterm victory ever and this columnist would insist that this prospect could have materialised without a flawed electoral strategy (even while admitting that factors like corruption scandals and recessive monetary policies did not help although also countered by the game-changer of Donald Trump’s intervention).
A momentous win last month but sometimes things can turn out right while doing everything wrong. This history graduate is reminded of the battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212, perhaps the biggest victory of the Spanish Reconquista when a Christian army fell headlong into a trap cunningly set by the Moors luring them with their gaudy camp atop a steep slope to march down a valley with their flanks exposed to light cavalry and archers on the ridges on either side. But the sheer weight of heavy metal brushed aside the flank attacks, toiled up the slope and smashed the Moorish camp in a famous victory which would never have been fought without the unimaginative stupidity of the Christian army. By the same token the Javier Milei administration followed a steady stream of unforced errors with falling into such ruses as rehashing José Luis Espert’s blunders from six years ago while the sheer weight of heavy metal was the continued need for change, the lack of alternatives beyond blanket opposition and fear of crisis turning into a free fall.
To continue processing the nuts and bolts of the midterms, we will start with Buenos Aires City and Province now that the final official results are in.
The province totalled 9,127,527 votes out of an electorate of 13,506,058 for a turnout of 67.6 percent. In the final count Alianza Libertad Avanza squeezed ahead with 3,649,988 votes (17 deputies) as against 3,620,634 for Fuerza Patria (16 deputies) with the remaining two deputies going to the leftist Frente de Izquierda y de Trabajo-Unidad (443,254 votes or 85,000 more than in the provincial elections). The media-driven lawyer Fernando Burlando’s Propuesta Federal para el Cambio netted enough votes (246,246) to reach the quotient to earn him a seat but fell short of the three-percent threshold, knocking back Alianza Provincias Unidas (the third party nationwide) into fifth place with 215,585 votes. Two other lists – anti-Kirchnerite Peronist Santiago Cúneo’s Partido Nuevo Buenos Aires (117,149 votes) and the neo-Nazi Frente Patriota Federal (105,900 votes) – topped one percent. Eight other lists (including Coalición Cívica ARI, once forming part of Macri’s ruling coalition, and the neo-PRO Alianza Potencia) fell below one percent with Unión Federal perhaps the most interesting.
Why? Because the 79,215 votes won by Esteban Echeverría Peronist Mayor Fernando Gray almost trebled the slender difference of 29,354 votes between Diego Santilli’s list and Jorge Taiana’s Fuerza Patria. If we add Gray and Cúneo to the votes for a Provincias Unidas headed by Florencio Randazzo, who was Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s favourite minister for a time, the Peronist dissidents potentially total 411,949 votes while the two libertarian splinters chipped a mere 54,967 votes off the winning list. On election night then-Cabinet chief Guillermo Francos had announced a margin of 46,600 (with Buenos Aires Governor Axel Kicillof expressing hopes of cutting it to 38,000 in the interim) while the final gap of 29,354 votes cuts the percentage difference from 0.53 to 0.3 percent.
Since analysis of Buenos Aires Province was the main topic last Saturday, ‘FIN’ for this district (as Adorni would tweet) although the blame game continues within Peronism where Cristina Fernández de Kirchner insists that their best shot was wasted on winning the provincial battle rather than the national war while Kicillof supporters argue that they could have lost at both levels against the Milei juggernaut if the elections had not been split.
If we view this metropolis as internationally perceived by combining the Federal Capital with Greater Buenos Aires, Milei would win by an even narrower margin of under 15,000 votes: 3,096,469 to 3,081,681 for Fuerza Patria. But the Federal Capital votes apart, of course, and is the next on the list. Since it was one of the eight districts voting for senators as well as deputies, there were two tiers of voting for the 17 lists so space could be lacking for the final official results, so these plus analysis and senatorial voting elsewhere will be the focus of next week’s column.
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