Peronism has given one of the most unusual shows in its history by ruling out on Friday night the presidential candidate nominated by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner just 24 hours before.
Eduardo De Pedro, Minister of the Interior, had released a video late Thursday afternoon with a clear message: “I want to be your president.” The desire lasted a day, the time it took the vice president to realize that the formula headed by De Pedro and completed by former governor Juan Manzur was rejected by most of Peronism.
Thus, the once all-powerful Fernández de Kirchner had to retrace the path and offer the candidacy to Sergio Massa, Minister of Economy. The vice-presidential candidate will be Agustín Rossi, current head of the Cabinet of Ministers and proposed by President Alberto Fernández.
The formula is quite a milestone, because for the first time in 20 years it does not include Kirchnerists. Massa is also a political leader who fractured Peronism more than a decade ago and for years faced Fernández de Kirchner and the leaders of La Cámpora, the Kirchner youth organization, whose members he assured he would send to prison.
Rossi is an ally of Fernández, the devalued president who in the final stretch of his term managed to twist the arm of the vice president, with whom he had a stormy relationship and with whom he has not spoken for months. Fernández forced the resignation of Daniel Scioli, his ally, from the presidential candidacy, paving the way for Massa.
“Due to institutional, political and social responsibility, our space has decided to form a unit list that will represent us in the next elections,” Peronism said on the Unión por la Patria social media account, the brand it will use in the next elections. .
The “unity candidacy” implies that Peronism will not elect its candidates democratically, something that, with the exception of one time in 1988, is the tradition of the political movement in its almost 80 years of existence.
Patricia Bullrich, presidential candidate for the opposition Juntos por el Cambio and with a good performance in the polls, was devastating in her analysis of Massa’s rise: “He is the captain of the Titanic. He came to help and destroyed everyone’s lives much more the Argentines”.
Massa’s management, who took office in August 2022, has so far offered a serious growth in inflation and poverty, although Peronism is rooted in the idea that his arrival in government prevented an economic debacle even worse than the one current.
“Why did Cristina admit a formula made up of a man who has already betrayed her once and another who today answers to Alberto Fernández?” analyst Ignacio Miri asked in ‘Clarín’.
“A possible answer is that she believes that the ruling party will lose the presidency and that the best strategy is for her army to take refuge in the legislative lists,” said Miri.
“It was the end of the finger,” said Martín Rodríguez Yebra in ‘La Nación’, while recalling the contrast with 2019, when the two-time president announced in a video that her candidate would be Fernández and she reserved the vice-presidential nomination . No one opposed that, but four years later many Peronist leaders made him see that De Pedro’s candidacy for the presidency was a guarantee of defeat.
The polls for the general primaries on August 13 place Peronism at a historic vote floor, with the opposition Juntos por el Cambio leading and the ultra-liberal Javier MIlei disputing second position and access to a runoff that could leave out Peronism.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
