BUENOS AIRES — Six months before Argentines pick a new president, the center-right mayor of the nation’s capital makes little effort to hide his confidence that he will replace unpopular two-term incumbent Cristina Fernandez. But whether Mauricio Macri gets to move into the Casa Rosada and undo the president’s leftist agenda — as he has promised — may depend largely on factors beyond his control.
A Macri victory would be a crippling defeat for Ms. Fernandez, who has long said that she and her husband and predecessor, the late Nestor Kirchner, have over the past 12 years merely begun to establish a “Kirchnerist” model to transform Latin America’s second-largest country, a model based on nationalism and protectionism. The presidents’ son, Maximo Kirchner, last month went so far as to try to tie the mayor to former President Fernando de la Rua, the deeply unpopular former leader who resigned in 2001 amid the country’s violent default.
Ever since he took the reins of the Buenos Aires city government in 2007, the 56-year-old engineer and former head of the Boca Juniors soccer club has served as the favorite political punching bag for the Kirchners. But Mr. Macri has managed to capitalize on the attacks thanks to his popularity with the capital’s middle-class electorate, which has shown little love for the president’s populism amid the country’s economic woes.
“The challenge is to do more in the next four years than in the last eight, and I know that we can do it,” he told a crowd of supporters this week. “Let us not be afraid. We deserve to live better, we can live better, and we know that we can do more.”
In 2011, Mr. Macri shrewdly declined to run in an election that Ms. Fernandez ended up winning in a historic landslide. But with the term-limited president set to leave office in December, Mr. Macri beamed with self-assurance this week as he celebrated the primary victory of his hand-picked mayoral successor and outlined his own presidential ambitions.
The vote is Oct. 25, with a possible runoff in November between the two top finishers if no party achieves a sufficient plurality.
Unlike Ms. Fernandez, whose $6 million net worth contrasts sharply with her family’s humble, working-class origins, Mr. Macri was born into wealth as the son of Italian-Argentine business magnate Franco Macri. His father’s support for Mr. Kirchner and Ms. Fernandez has led to a number of highly publicized family disputes, with Franco Macri at one point going so far as to say that his son lacked “the heart to be president.”
Mr. Macri joined his father’s conglomerate soon after earning a civil engineering degree and first entered the spotlight in 1995 when his fellow Boca Juniors members chose him to lead the famous soccer club. He used the post he held for 13 years to found his own political party, which in 2005 catapulted him into Congress and — two years later — into Buenos Aires’ mayoral chair.
Today, Mr. Macri stands out among Argentina’s opposition leaders as the Kirchners’ “best enemy,” said Marcelo Camusso, who heads the political science department at the Catholic University of Argentina.
“Macri’s career took off from the beginning,” Mr. Camusso said. “He was able to insert himself into the political landscape in a very successful way.”
Mr. Macri’s pragmatism and easygoing attitude are among his key selling points, said political analyst Graciela Romer, especially after the high-drama years of government under Ms. Fernandez.
“The public has tired of this rather confrontational leadership style,” she said.
Mr. Macri has vowed to fight corruption, eliminate tight currency controls and adopt a more U.S.-friendly foreign policy if he succeeds Ms. Fernandez. He also has promised a departure from the president’s often abrasive style, on display at this month’s Summit of the Americas, where she dubbed President Obama’s Venezuela policy “ridiculous” for its public clashes with populist President Nicolas Maduro.
“The axis of this government’s foreign policy has been only having close ties with Venezuela, and we believe that the axis of our foreign policy should be the entire world,” Mr. Macri told Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer in a recent interview, saying that would include improved ties with Brazil and Uruguay and closer collaboration with the Pacific Alliance economic bloc that includes Chile, Colombia, Peru and Mexico.
Hitting back
Critics say that beyond rosy rhetoric, Mr. Macri has little to show for eight years of governing the Argentine capital. Among the charges leveled against the mayor are his over-the-top spending on political advertising, his unkept promise to significantly expand Buenos Aires’ subway system and the botched restoration of the famed Teatro Colon.
Axel Kicillof, Ms. Fernandez’s economy minister, previewed an expected line of campaign attack by telling reporters last month that Buenos Aires “is the richest district in the country, and he has done nothing if you compare it to what we have done with the provinces.”
Further complicating Mr. Macri’s presidential aspirations is Argentina’s peculiar electoral system that — under certain conditions — allows for a presidential candidate to be declared the winner if he captures as little as 40 percent of the popular vote.
Mr. Macri has forged an uneasy alliance with two center-left forces but ruled out a pact with Sergio Massa, a prominent Peronist and former Fernandez ally who is popular in the key electoral district of Buenos Aires Province. If Mr. Macri and Mr. Massa both end up on the ballot, a split in the opposition vote could very well benefit the likely nominee of Ms. Fernandez’s Front for Victory, Buenos Aires Gov. Daniel Scioli.
A former powerboat racer and vice president during Kirchner’s administration, Mr. Scioli has had a troubled relationship at times with Ms. Fernandez. But the governor of Buenos Aires Province — home to nearly 40 percent of Argentina’s population — has remained fiercely loyal to the president even as she publicly chided him over his requests for federal funding.
In a March survey conducted by the local firm Poliarquia, 31 percent of voters said they would support Mr. Scioli in the Oct. 25 first round of the presidential elections, while 25 percent backed Mr. Macri.
However, the governor’s numbers continued to improve, and Mr. Scioli eventually can count on the 35 percent of the vote from hard-line Fernandez supporters, Ms. Romer said. Mr. Macri, on the other hand, already has largely exhausted his base of support, pollsters noted.
Mr. Macri’s hopes, thus, are pinned on his opposition rival dropping out of the race, a move that would make it easier for him to force a runoff election with Mr. Scioli, journalist and political analyst Joaquin Morales Sola said.
“The only one who is able to win in the first round is Scioli,” the commentator said. But if the opposition unites around a single candidate, “it would be very difficult for [Mr. Scioli] to win in the second round.”
The mixed Kirchner legacy
Argentines still credit the Kirchners with the recovery from Argentina’s financial collapse in the previous decade, but they also have become increasingly uneasy with the tight import and currency controls imposed by Ms. Fernandez.
Stubbornly high inflation, an uptick in violent crime and the suspicious death of a prosecutor days after he accused the president of a cover-up also have taken a toll on the incumbent’s approval numbers.
Although he has promised to maintain the popular social welfare programs instituted by Kirchner and Ms. Fernandez, Mr. Macri never tires of painting the Oct. 25 vote as a change election.
“We have understood that we cannot entrust our future to those who for 25 years have promised us everything and delivered very little,” Mr. Macri added Monday on TN television.
But even if Mr. Macri’s electoral strategy pans out, his presidency likely would be hampered by the lack of a majority in Congress and confrontations with the traditionally Peronist labor unions, Mr. Morales Sola warned.
The prospect of this toxic mix, canonized in the local adage that “only Peronists can govern Argentina,” may turn out to be the biggest obstacle on the mayor’s path to the presidency.
Mr. Macri, in his Miami Herald interview, rejected the idea that he would be unable to put together an effective government, given the levers of power still in the hands of Ms. Kirchner and her allies.
“Let’s stick to the facts,” he said. “We have been governing the city of Buenos Aires for the past seven years despite having the hardest, most domineering [national government] in decades working against us. It will be much easier to govern if we are in the position of governing all of Argentina.”
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