Argentina’s president since 2019, Alberto Fernandez (centre-left), announced on Friday that he will not seek re-election in the general elections in October, further opening the field to an already uncertain ballot.
On December 10, the end of the presidential term, the 64-year-old head of state will hand over “the presidential sash to whoever has been legitimately elected”, he announced in a video. He had so far cast doubt on his participation in the primaries of the government camp in August.
Alberto Fernandez’s surprise announcement comes against the backdrop of a particularly feverish economic context, with inflation out of control, at 21.7% over three months, 104.3% year-on-year, after 94.8% in 2022.
It also punctuates a week that has seen increased pressure on Argentina’s currency, the peso, which is steadily depreciating against the dollar. The peso was trading Wednesday at 225 to the dollar at the official rate, but at 432 to the dollar at the informal rate.
Last month, in his last general policy speech in Parliament, Alberto Fernandez defended his three years of presidency in a hostile context marked by the Covid, the impact of the war in Ukraine, Argentine debt, against a backdrop of chronic inflation. But with two consecutive years of growth (10.3% in 2021, 5.4% in 2022), unprecedented in Argentina for twelve years.
His withdrawal leaves a particularly uncertain electoral field, with at this stage no obvious candidate emerging in the camp of the government coalition (centre-left).
Vice-President Cristina Kirchner, head of state from 2007 to 2015 and heiress of the Peronist current, announced at the end of 2022 that she would not run, shortly after her conviction in a trial for fraud and corruption during her presidential mandates .
The Minister of Economy since last July, Sergio Massa, 50, himself a former presidential candidate (in 2015), has been presented several times in the press as a possible candidate, this hypothesis being however closely linked to a stabilization of the economy.
In opposition, the former liberal president (from 2015 to 2019) Mauricio Macri also announced in March that he would not run for president, after having left doubts for a long time.
This step aside paved the way for two of the main figures of the opposition coalition Juntos por el Cambio, who declared their pre-candidacy: Horacio Larreta, 57, mayor (center-right) of Buenos Aires since 2015, and Patricia Bullrich, 66, the right-handed ex-security minister in the Macri government.
General elections in Argentina will take place on October 22, with a possible second round on November 19. The primaries, in the government camp as well as in the opposition, are scheduled for August 13.
04/21/2023 16:19:00 – Buenos Aires (Argentine) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
