Doug Lorimer
Argentine President Nestor Kirchner emerged as the victor after the country's October 23 mid-term legislative elections. Kirchner's Peronist governing Front for Victory (FPV) won 43% of the popular vote in the lower-house Chamber of Deputies and will now have a majority of seats in the senate.
This represents a substantial consolidation for Kirchner, once an once obscure governor from remote Patagonia who won the presidential election two years ago with just 22% of the popular vote when his run-off contender quit.
The non-Kirchner Peronists won 11%, the once-dominant Radical Party almost 14%, centre-right parties almost 8%, while candidates from the left-wing parties — which made a fragmented showing — were pushed into the background, winning no more than 27% of the vote.
Reuters reported on October 24 that on "the campaign trail, Kirchner won crowds with his habitual sharp-tongued attacks on the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and foreign investors, including giant Western European utility companies, while taking credit for a three-year economic rebound he said was possible because of snubbing the standard free market policies pushed by Wall Street ...
"Kirchner was helped by an economic boom now in its third year after a devastating 2001-2002 economic crash that forced a currency devaluation and massive debt default. The economy is growing at around 9 percent for the third year running." However, consumer prices are now rising at an annual rate of 10% — the first bout of double-digit inflation in three years.
Reuters reported that it is "still not clear whether a politically fortified Kirchner will agree to immediate loan talks with the IMF or speed up stalled negotiations with disgruntled utility companies to end a 2002 rate freeze".
Major utility companies, such as Suez of France, have opted to pull out of Argentina over the rate conflict and others, like Spain's Telefonica and Telecom Italia, are still negotiating.
Carola Sandy, an analyst with the Credit Suisse First Boston bank in New York, said that a Kirchner victory is a "positive or neutral market event" and that there was renewed interest in Argentine ruling circles in negotiations with the IMF.
Argentina suspended talks with the IMF last year to concentrate on restructuring its US$100 billion defaulted debt. The IMF has repeatedly said in the past few weeks it is ready to resume negotiations.
Since he became president, Kirchner has presented himself as a "progressive", mainly through his public declarations against the IMF and in favour of human rights, against the repressive policies of the military junta that ruled Argentina in the 1970s. He has also appeared on public platforms alongside Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
But this image as an opponent of US imperialist domination of Argentina and the rest of Latin America hasn't stopped him from making big payments to the imperialist banks on Argentina's external debt or aligning Argentina's foreign policy with those of Washington in crucial areas such as the US-backed occupation of Haiti.
Under Kirchner's government, the income gap has widened — the income of the richest 10% of Argentines is 33 times the income of the poorest 10%. In December 2001, it was 24 times.
Officially, 38% of the population is living below the poverty line (down from 50% in 2002). But more than a million families are kept just above that line via cash subsidies handed out by the government. This is used as one means of boosting Kirchner's electoral support.
Like Juan Peron in the 1940s, Kirchner has combined anti-imperialist rhetoric, resistance to the most blatant demands of the imperialist banks and support for the Argentine capitalists with the use of government resources to buy popular electoral support.
Writing for the London-based Open Democracy website on October 26, University of Buenos Aires politics lecturer Celia Szusterman observed that Kirchner, "although not himself a candidate, mobilised all the resources of the state to fund the campaign of his party and his allies. He travelled 50,000 miles in the last two months to attend public events state-managed by his supporters (including the busing of people, payments of cash and food); he made funds available to provide free washing machines and DVD players to the poorest dwellers of Buenos Aires province; and he constantly denounced the opposition as enemies of 'the new Argentina' (while never defining properly his own 'project' for the country).
"Kirchner's approach indicates the most striking aspect of this campaign: it was one bereft of ideas or proposals. There was nothing other than individual people, political figures, to identify with. When voices were raised to criticise government policies — their lack of transparency or lack of policies (as in areas of education or law and order) — the government ignored them. It was extraordinary to observe that in a country with 40% of its population living below the poverty line, not once was the issue of poverty discussed."
From Green Left Weekly, November 2, 2005.
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