It’s All (Still) Coming Up Cristina

BUENOS AIRES — In September 2012, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner took to the airwaves to chastise her cabinet for delays in cleaning up a putrid river outside Buenos Aires. In a televised address delivered from the Casa Rosada, the government palace, she warned, “You should only fear God.” She paused for a beat, before adding: “And me a little.” The audience members looked at one another and applauded nervously.

Three years later, those words haunt not only Fernández’s administrators, but her potential successors. On Oct. 25, Argentines will vote in elections marking the end of a dozen years of government by Fernández and her late husband, Néstor Kirchner. Fernández is constitutionally barred from seeking a consecutive third term, despite rumors over the years that she might try.

The new president is likely to be Daniel Scioli, the current governor of Buenos Aires province and a member of Fernández’s Peronist Front for Victory party. Polls show he is close to the 40 percent plus 10-point lead that he needs to triumph over Mauricio Macri, the center-right mayor of Buenos Aires city, in the upcoming first round of voting. If Scioli falls short, he and Macri will go head-to-head in a runoff scheduled for Nov. 22. Scioli would still be favored to win a second round but by a much smaller margin.

Historically, leaders of Argentina have slipped quickly and quietly out of the spotlight after leaving the Casa Rosada. Fernández could prove the exception, looming in the background as Scioli or Macri assume power. “We are living [in] an unprecedented moment. It is the first time in decades that a president is leaving office with considerable power left,” said Juan Cruz Díaz, managing director at Cefeidas Group, an international advisory firm. “That makes Fernández’s post-presidency influence harder to predict.” A strong Fernández raises the potential for conflict within the Peronist party if Scioli wins or gridlock and chaos if Macri wins. Neither would augur well for the stability of Argentina, which is already politically polarized and economically insecure.

Fernández’s popularity can be difficult to comprehend. Influential journalists consistently accuse her of money laundering and corruption. Her vice president, a shaggy-haired, motorcycle-riding guitarist, has been indicted on charges of corruption and falsification of public documents since taking office in 2011. Inflation has remained at 25 percent or higher for years. In 2011, Fernández restricted the sale of foreign currency to individuals and companies, making it much more difficult to hedge against rising prices. Last July, a disagreement with creditors pushed Argentina into default, scuttling the possibility of seeking external funding. And most dramatically, this past February, Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor investigating the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center — Argentina’s deadliest terrorist attack — was found dead in his bathroom the day before he was scheduled to bring charges of concealment and obstruction against Fernández. It is highly unlikely she ordered his death, or committed the crimes Nisman accused her of, but her bungled, erratic response betrayed an unsettling level of panic.

These setbacks and scandals might have toppled a lesser politician. Fernández, instead, will leave office with the second-highest approval rating since the end of Argentina’s military dictatorship in 1983. Between 40 and 50 percent of Argentines view her positively.

To explain her appeal, analysts often point to Fernández’s vast expansion of government programs and the public workforce. According to Luis Secco of Perspectiv@s Económicas, an economic consultancy, Fernández has doubled the number of Argentines that receives government benefits since she took over from her late husband in 2007. Nearly half the population currently collects welfare, retirement payments, or wages from the state. Such munificence has helped Fernández seduce a large swath of the Argentine population. A survey by Management and Fit, a polling group, suggests a quarter of the population hopes that the next president further “deepens [her] model.” Another third wants only moderate change. The blueprint for electoral success, then, is clear: woo Fernández’s zealous voter base while hinting at measured reforms once in office.

It is only by cozying up to Fernández that Scioli has forced his way to the head of the electoral pack. She appears with him at many campaign events and features in his television ads and billboards. Scioli also tapped Carlos Zannini, her closest and — arguably, only — true confidant as his vice president.

Many of Scioli’s voters are candid: They’re backing him only because he’s Fernández’s anointed successor. “I’m voting for Scioli because he’s the candidate of the [Kirchner] project,” said Ángeles Prestipino, a 28-year-old architect. “Cristina’s support is fundamental. I believe that Scioli will continue along the same line and that any changes he makes won’t be deep ones.”

But Scioli and the Kirchners have not always seen eye to eye. In 2003, the former powerboat racer accepted Néstor Kirchner’s invitation to serve as his vice president, only to fall out of favor with him shortly after the inauguration when Scioli publicly criticized Kirchner’s plan to annul laws related to Argentina’s military dictatorship and disagreed with his plan to freeze utilities tariffs. Even after Scioli later won the governorship of Buenos Aires province, Argentina’s wealthiest and most populous district, the tension with his former boss did not abate. At a political event in 2010, Kirchner lambasted Scioli for his lax approach to fighting crime.

His relationship with Fernández has been equally strained. As president, she has often belittled him and denied him funding for his province, where nearly 40 percent of Argentines live. Why? Seemingly to keep him in check as he began voicing his desire for higher office and forging ties with prominent power brokers like union leader Hugo Moyano.

Until June, it seemed as though Fernández would push Florencio Randazzo, another member of her party, to run for president against Scioli. The governor recognized that he needed Fernández’s undivided backing to win and quickly invited Zannini to run alongside him as vice president. Fernández dropped Randazzo and begrudgingly threw her support behind Scioli, her old foe.

Despite their fraught history, Zannini’s appearance on Scioli’s ticket caused many Argentines to wonder whether he will be a carbon copy of Fernández. Analysts say his overtures to the president are purely utilitarian. But his reliance on her isn’t exactly comforting for voters who prefer change over continuity. When asked by a Radio Mitre reporter about how his policies will differ from Fernández’s, he responded coyly that he will “sustain what needs to be sustained, deepen what needs to be deepened, and change what needs to be changed.”

Should Scioli want to pursue more sweeping reforms, it’s unclear whether he’ll be able to execute them. Many observers expect him to try to reach a settlement with the holdout creditors that pushed Argentina into default, repair Argentina’s relationships with the outside world, open up to the press, and, eventually, dismantle the tangle of trade and currency controls that is currently strangling the economy.

Alberto Fernández (no relation), Kirchner’s cabinet chief, who served Fernández for a year before they clashed, believes his old boss will fight to sustain her policies after she’s gone. “You listen to her speeches, and she’s very clear about her intentions,” he said. During a recent campaign event for Scioli in her home province of Santa Cruz, she insisted: “This transformation won’t be curbed, because Daniel will be president of all the Argentines and he will continue this great project that we’ve started.”

Fernández has suffered from health problems in recent years, and many Argentines speculate that she might disappear from the political stage. But others doubt her will to retire. She has held an elected office for almost 25 years (she began in the provincial legislature in 1991). Completely relinquishing power could be difficult for her psychologically, as political scientists like Sergio Berensztein have said.

Díaz, the political analyst, believes that as long as the next president remains strong, Fernández will stay on the sidelines. “She wouldn’t want to risk showing that she’s no longer powerful,” he said. But if she senses weakness in her successor, she could capitalize on it. Although Fernández will not have a majority in either house, she will retain a diehard group of allies in the legislature who could hassle the next president if he tries to pass laws that displease her. Aníbal Fernández (no relation), the likely next governor of Buenos Aires, perhaps the second-most important post in the country, has been a loyal Kirchnerista for over a decade and will likely remain so.

If Scioli wins, as is expected, there’s also the question of Zannini. As in the United States, Argentine vice presidents are not inherently powerful (Scioli knows from personal experience how a president can spurn his second-in-command). However, in times of weakness, seditious vice presidents can inflict considerable damage on their bosses. Fernández was nearly forced out of office when her first vice president sided against her on a tied vote about agricultural taxes in 2008. If he wins, Scioli will inherit a country saddled with high inflation, low reserves, and trade and currency restrictions that have stifled investment and production. Should the economy implode in his face, Zannini, and by extension Fernández, will see their potential for influence swell.

In the unlikely event that Macri wins, the equation is simpler. Fernández, who thrives on confrontation, would reign as the unofficial leader of the Peronist opposition. Macri promises to restore independence of the central bank, judiciary, and intelligence services, but his scope for change would be limited by his party’s weakness. His team’s performance in Argentina’s provinces over the course of this year was dismal: At most, he will have two governors in place from his party, the center-right Republican Proposal. His legislators will occupy minorities in both houses of congress. History doesn’t bode well for Macri either. The last non-Peronist elected president, Fernando de la Rúa, fled the Casa Rosada in a helicopter in 2001, only two years into his term. Before him, Raúl Alfonsín handed over power to a Peronist five months early.

Fernández has stayed mum about her future aspirations. She has expressed a desire to go back to Santa Cruz, but her claque has already started to murmur about a potential return to the presidency in four years. Of such a plan Fernández has said only: “I hope that in 2019 the country doesn’t need me.”

Photo credit: Eitan Abramovich/AFP