BUENOS AIRES — Four years ago, Mauricio Macri’s victory over longtime leftist President Cristina Fernandez’s hand-picked successor was supposed to put the first nail in the coffin of Latin America’s “pink tide” populism. But amid stubborn economic malaise, Argentina’s self-styled left — and Ms. Fernandez herself — now seem poised for unexpected resurrection.
Patience with Mr. Macri’s pro-market policies is wearing thin as Argentines struggle with an almost 4 percent monthly inflation rate, rising unemployment and a more than twentyfold increase in utility and transportation prices in some local markets. The economy shrank by more than 6 percent in the last quarter of 2018, and inflation and the need to keep government debt under control gave Mr. Macri virtually no room for stimulus spending.
Renewed nostalgia for the relative boom years of Ms. Fernandez’s 2007-2015 tenure now all but assures a dramatic Macri-Fernandez showdown when Argentines head to the polls Oct. 27. Term limits precluded such a head-to-head clash in the last election cycle.
Though Ms. Fernandez has been mum about her intentions, the “CFK 2019” personalized license plate casually placed on a desk at her think tank leaves little room for doubt, as do the “She can beat him” signs plastered across Buenos Aires bus stops.
Meanwhile, Mr. Macri, a center-right former businessman who has been said to welcome the matchup with his longtime political nemesis, projected confidence in his annual address to Congress on March 1 that voters would not be lured by the siren call of the country’s leftist past.
“There’s no turning back of what we’re doing,” he said in an apparent nod to Ms. Fernandez, now a senator. “We no longer believe in magical solutions because we know that profound transformations take time.”
This year’s vote, like the 2015 election, may have reverberations far beyond Argentina. Just as Ms. Fernandez was part of a generation of leftist politicians who dominated much of South American politics after the turn of the century, Mr. Macri was part of a counterwave of more conservative, market-oriented leaders in recent years. After being shut out for a long period, conservatives are in power not just in Argentina but also in Colombia, Chile and, just recently, Brazil.
But Mr. Macri’s perceived failure to deliver on bold promises of “zero poverty” and a “downpour of investments” is increasingly causing flutters at the presidential Casa Rosada and within his ruling Cambiemos coalition.
Defying Macri
The president, who never tires of reassuring Argentines that he feels their pain, has moved to slow further hikes in gas prices until after the election. But some of his allies, facing an angry electorate themselves, were moving to distance themselves from the president.
In Cordoba, the central province that Mr. Macri won by a 43-point margin in 2015 and is key to his re-election, gubernatorial hopeful Ramon Mestre flat out refused a presidential order to bow out of his race in favor of Mario Negri, the Casa Rosada’s preferred candidate.
In a different political climate, Mr. Mestre, the mayor of the provincial capital, would be unlikely to defy Mr. Macri this brazenly, said Facundo Cruz, a University of Buenos Aires political scientist and author of a book about Argentina’s shifting electoral lineups.
“When the economy is in recession … the president and the entire administration lose electoral weight,” Mr. Cruz said. “Allies begin to take distance, particularly during the final year of [the] term [as they] pay the price, while when there’s success, the success is the president’s.”
Highlighting his own credentials as a Cambiemos co-founder, Mr. Mestre took a page out of Ms. Fernandez’s playbook to hammer the administration over the utility price hikes, claim credit for hitting the pause button and challenge Mr. Macri’s authority as coalition leader.
“We asked [Mr. Macri] to lower the prices so the everyday expenses don’t increase as much for Argentines, and especially for people in Cordoba,” he said. “Nobody issues orders here; we’re all leaders and citizens.”
All of this, of course, is fodder for Ms. Fernandez, who with her late husband and predecessor, Nestor Kirchner, dominated the political scene for more than a decade before her party’s repudiation in the 2015 vote. She left the presidency dogged by scandals and with the government’s coffers empty, but she is now deftly using criticism of Mr. Macri’s painful belt-tightening cuts to government subsidies to burnish her image as a supposed champion of the working class.
“Argentine men and women don’t know how to pay school supplies; the power, gas and water bills; the health insurance premium; building expenses and rent; the [products in] the grocery store cart,” she said last month in her trademark blunderbuss rhetorical style.
But beyond such pocketbook issues undoubtedly “unhelpful” to Mr. Macri, the campaign is likely once again to showcase starkly clashing visions for the country’s basic setup, said Mariano de Vedia, a political analyst for the La Nacion daily.
“The discussion we’ll have will certainly pit Macri’s ’neoliberal’ or ’capitalist’ model against [Ms. Fernandez’s] ’progressive’ model,” Mr. de Vedia said.
But it turns out that this black-and-white scenario is not necessarily bad news for the incumbent, who despite his recent political setbacks won’t have to worry about his opponent chipping away at his own base, Mr. de Vedia said.
“Even though the situation isn’t beneficial, it’s a playing field on which the administration feels comfortable as well,” he said. “It would be more difficult to face [someone who] could challenge you for your own electorate.”
Challenges for Fernandez
For all the rocks she is throwing at Mr. Macri, Ms. Fernandez has a tough electoral road ahead.
Considered toxic even by many of her longtime allies, the populist firebrand has just racked up her seventh indictment — this one over a stolen 19th-century letter written by independence hero Jose de San Martin that somehow turned up at her home last year.
Ms. Fernandez is also accused of having championed a $250 million corruption scheme whose colorful details include a presidential jet allegedly making weekly trips to shuttle bags full of cash payoffs from Buenos Aires to her homes in southern Argentina.
Although her former vice president and planning minister have been jailed on corruption charges — and Ms. Fernandez has evaded arrest only because of her congressional immunity — the candidate in waiting dismisses her troubles as “political persecution.”
Whether voters are ready to forgive and forget could be critical to the Oct. 27 vote. Argentines are showing signs that they aren’t ready to buy what Ms. Fernandez is peddling.
“The legal issues will certainly matter” to Ms. Fernandez, Mr. de Vedia said. “If it comes up in the media during the campaign, she would have to provide a great deal of explanations, which she hasn’t.”
With Ms. Fernandez’s first trial set to kick off May 21, the likely public questioning won’t help her expand her electorate either, the La Nacion analyst said.
“It would be weird to think that someone who didn’t vote for her in 2015 or [in the] 2017 [midterm elections] — it’s difficult to think she’d get more votes,” he said. “People don’t forget, it seems to me.”
Pollsters, for now, rate Mr. Macri as the slight favorite in a likely runoff in November if no one wins outright in October. Under Argentina’s electoral system, if no candidate in the first round has at least 45 percent of the ballot — or 40 percent and at least a 10-point lead — the top two finishers go head to head in a second round.
Mr. Macri had been a slight favorite in the polls, but that may be turning, A recent poll in the Cronista Comercial gave Mr. Macri a 27 percent approval rating compared with 50.4 percent who disapprove. Ms. Kirchner, by contrast, had a 35 percent approval rating and a 47 percent negative rating. In an ominous sign for the incumbent, inflation and the rest of the economy were the clearly dominant issues on the voters’ minds.
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