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<!-- CFK’s ticket to run

By: Martín Gambarotta

The President is popular so there’s little room for immediate dissent in the Peronist party over her choice of congressional candidates

There’s plenty of stuff to keep you entertained. Things like the liberation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the relegation of soccer giants River Plate, and Prince Albert’s wedding in Monaco. That’s entertainment. But what you are really waiting for are the general elections scheduled for October. Argentine politics, for now, is one big waiting room. Sure, things happen. River Plate’s relegation was marred by violence, prompting complaints that the national government can’t control a riot any more.

But it should be time by now for politics to dominate the news. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has already named her running mate, Economy Minister Amado Boudou. There’s also a lot going on in the corruption case involving Sergio Schoklender, the former financial manager of the human rights group Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. But the presidential race is not on fire just yet.

There is, yes, a number of opposition presidential candidates who call themselves competitive: Deputy Ricardo Alfonsín (Radical), Deputy Elisa Carrió (Civic Coalition), Santa Fe Governor Hermes Binner (Socialist) and former caretaker president Eduardo Duhalde (dissident Peronist). But, and this is unusual, Argentina’s presidential race is nothing to get excited about, probably because polls show Fernández de Kirchner is clearly in the lead. Alfonsín, speaking at a rally yesterday, admitted the President leads him by “12, 13 or 14 points.”

The evidence is clear. The President’s candidate for governor in Misiones province scored a landslide re-election victory on Sunday. In Tierra del Fuego, the President’s Victory Front also won on Sunday and will face the incumbent governor in a runoff today. Yawn, by Argentine standards all this was predictable.

Yet there’s still time for the landscape to change. It’s still not clear whether Fernández de Kirchner will rise above the Schoklender case, which is an embarrassment for her administration because the pro-government Mothers of Plaza de Mayo built houses with public money.

Technically an estimated 765 million pesos in public funds were managed by the Mothers through provincial and provincial administrations. A judge (Norberto Oyarbide), the Lower House of Congress and the Auditor General’s Office are investigating.

The money was sent to the provinces by the national Federal Planning Ministry headed by Julio De Vido. De Vido has said that it is the local governments who must now explain if the Mothers de Plaza de Mayo actually built the houses once they got the cash. Oyarbide is probing allegations Schoklender (who served out a sentence for killing his parents in 1981 and then tried to reinvent himself as a lawyer and activist) amassed a fortune and laundered money.

Seventeen mayors from across Argentina, including some non-Peronist ones, were summoned by a Lower House committee on Wednesday to testify about the Schoklender allegations. But all the mayors failed to show up and most of them, while cursing under their breath, pointed in the direction of De Vido’s Planning Ministry if there’s any need for explanations. Also under scrutiny is María Alejandra Bonafini, the daughter of the Mothers’ head Hebe de Bonafini.

The Schoklender case could be a factor in the mayoral elections scheduled to be staged in Buenos Aires on Sunday because the housing projects managed by the Mothers first started in this city. The negative headlines from the case could harm the chances of CFK’s candidate, Senator Daniel Filmus of the Victory Front. Filmus is one of the main challengers faced by Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri, the leader of the centre-right party PRO. Another contender if the leftwing filmmaker Fernando Solanas, who opposes the CFK administration. The fact that polls show Filmus is expected to face Macri in a runoff is new in itself. Polls show Macri will win on Sunday, but that the runoff with Filmus will settle the election on July 31. Filmus’ performance is further evidence that the President’s popularity is holding its ground here in Buenos Aires, a city which has rarely voted Peronist. CFK was close to getting personally involved in the campaign when on Tuesday, with Filmus in attendance, she announced a plan for Border and Coast guards to patrol southern neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires.

There is still an outside chance Filmus will defeat Macri on July 31. But the Schoklender case does not help Filmus’ chances. A runoff is so likely that expect the real mayoral race will only start after Sunday’s vote.

Another test for the Victory Front will be the gubernatorial elections in Santa Fe province scheduled for July 24 (the day of the Copa América final). The good news for the opposition is that the Victory Front could lose in Santa Fe against Binner’s Socialist Party.

Unfortunately for all sides involved things are more complicated than this. Macri had originally planned to run for president but bowed out purportedly because polls showed that many voters backing him for mayor plan to vote for Fernández de Kirchner in October. (The same thing could happen in Santa Fe.)

The President’s popularity is what is holding the Victory Front together. Fernández de Kirchner, because she is so popular, turned the nomination of her vice-president (Boudou) into a spectacle in Olivos last Saturday.

The President, through her Legal Secretary Carlos Zannini, also personally chose the candidates who will run for Congress on the Victory Front tickets nationwide in October.

The President’s choices irked some in the Peronist party, including the CGT union umbrella group headed by truck driver Hugo Moyano. Two members of Moyano’s inner circle in the CGT, Juan Carlos Schmid (expected to run in Santa Fe) and Julio Piumato (expected to run in the City of Buenos Aires), quit the Victory Front tickets because they were moved down to positions with little chance of actually getting them elected. Moyano was reportedly on the verge of not attending Saturday’s ceremony in Olivos over this.

Taxi driver Omar Viviani, also a member of Moyano’s inner circle, has admitted that the CGT was simmering over the President’s decision to demote two of its men. Yet Moyano did not utter a word in public on the issue. Schmid eventually declared that the controversy about candidates was over and that the CGT would continue to back the President, amid speculation that Interior Minister Florencio Randazzo had placed a telephone call to Moyano.

The President was harsh with the CGT. Fernández de Kirchner, speaking at a rally in Greater Buenos Aires in May, complained in public about “blackmail” by the trade unions. Her speech came after Moyano, speaking at a CGT rally on April 29, had backed CFK’s re-election, but also demanded positions for trade union leaders on the Victory Front’s congressional tickets.

The CGT, which has for now avoided confrontation, seems to have paid a price for voicing political demands in public and trying to pressure the President into naming trade union candidates.

Moyano’s inner circle seems to have misunderstood what Fernández de Kirchner expects of them. “Loyalty,” Fernández de Kirchner said in Olivos on Saturday, is what drove her to anoint Boudou as her running-mate.

When all is said and done has two candidates on the Victory Front’s congressional slate in Buenos Aires province: the metal industry worker Carlos Gdansky (not one of Moyano’s men) and Facundo Moyano (Moyano’s son).

National government officials meanwhile played down the speculation about discontent in the Peronist party saying that all sectors were satisfied with the President’s decision.

The only Kirchnerite completely left out was Luis D’Elía, a militant activists from Greater Buenos Aires who has publicly lobbied for Iran. Yet also reportedly grumbling were the old guard Peronist mayors from Greater Buenos Aires for having lost out to La Cámpora, the Kirchnerite youth wing established by Máximo Kirchner (the President’s son).

Boudou was at the centre of a moderate amount of controversy when he said that the mayors had nothing to complain about because the Victory Front candidates would lead to “renovation.” Boudou’s camp later complained that the opposition press was trying to stoke an argument between the Peronist old guard and the militant Kirchnerites.

The President has also named loyalist Gabriel Mariotto as the running-mate of incumbent Buenos Aires province Governor Daniel Scioli. But Scioli has not complained in public about Mariotto’s appointment and instead invited him to a cabinet meeting. Hugo Curto, the old school Peronist mayor of Tres de Febrero and a former trade union leader, also made a point of saying that there was nothing to complain about and that the mayors gets on really well with Boudou.

So what is going on? The President is trying to stamp her authority on the Peronist party before the election.

Fernández de Kirchner is not playing with fire because the chances that she will win are high. But she is playing with the Peronist old guard (and Moyano’s CGT) and could eventually pay a price if her popularity drops, say, in 2012.

Yet there is very little chance that fighting in the Peronist party will erupt before the presidential elections (or before the presidential primaries scheduled for August 14). CFK is currently in control and will be only challenged from inside the Peronist party, if ever, in the distant future if her popularity fails her.

Moyano controls most of the transport sector unions and has the muscle to cause havoc. But Moyano’s weak point is that his union’s healthcare scheme is being probed in court for corruption involving state refunds.

Swiss prosecutors have also asked Oyarbide to report on Moyano’s alleged ties to the garbage collection company Covelia. The Swiss prosecutors asked for the information after detecting an account holding 1.8 million dollars belonging to Covelia. The daily Clarín has reported that documents show the Foreign Ministry has turned down requests for further information over technicalities, implying that Moyano, despite his hushed argument with CFK, is still getting legal protection from the national government. Whither the economy? By: Michael Soltys

Now that Economy Minister Amado Boudou is firmly ensconced as President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s running-mate (and even de facto vice-president, according to some of his recent words), it is perhaps time to look at who will take his place — and even more what, contrary to the local vice of placing personalities above policies. For that reason it is not worth wasting much ink on speculating over the identity of the next minister and perhaps there is no need to look further afield than from whence Boudou replaced Carlos Fernández two years ago — namely, the ANSeS social security administration (the real Central Bank at least as far as government reserves are concerned, ever since the seizure of the AFJP private pension funds in late 2008), which is now headed by Diego Bossio. And if not Bossio, probably some other Young Turk from the ultra-fashionable La Cámpora youth group (unless 62-year-old Banco Nación President Juan Carlos Fábrega is given the nod).

But the real question is what Boudou’s promotion means in terms of economic policy — whether it is a vote for continuity or a prelude to “deepening the model” of populist state intervention to the chagrin of global markets. There is a third school of thought — that the severe macro-economic imbalances will impose a sharp change of direction once election year is over but nobody should count on it. Not only does the rhetoric of the CFK administration suggest a steep learning curve but ANSeS and Central Bank reserves probably permit it to stay in denial until 2013 before reality bites. On Friday CFK was again gloating over Greece while omitting to mention that even now the Greek economy is two-thirds of the Argentine with only a quarter of the population. Nor is it easy to reverse the inflationary trends which government circles insist are the price of growth (with La Cámpora’s rising star Axel Kiciloff the latest to state this creed) — it is estimated that the “inflationary tax” nets the government an extra seven billion dollars in revenues a year even if it has also been estimated that the bill for subsidizing the populist pricing of transport fares and public utility rates (the most visible cost of inflation denial) will reach 65 billion or 16 billion dollars this year.

Still as Richard III said: “But yet I run before my horse to market” — the CFK-Boudou ticket must first win the October elections.

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