Argentine Leader Hits Bump in Election

Argentine Leader Hits Bump in Election – by Matt Moffett

Buenos Aires' Mayor Mauricio Macri, center right, celebrates with supporters at his headquarters in Buenos Aires after winning re-election by a wide margin.

The drubbing endured by leftist President Cristina Kirchner’s handpicked candidate in the mayoral election here on Sunday highlights the growing probability that Mrs. Kirchner’s bid for re-election in October won’t quite be the cakewalk some of her followers had anticipated.

Conservative Mayor Mauricio Macri easily won a second term, trouncing Mrs. Kirchner’s ally, Daniel Filmus, by 64.3% to 35.7% in the runoff vote.

Mrs. Kirchner is still the clear favorite in the divided field for the October presidential election, analysts said. Even many Argentines who don’t like her polarizing style aren’t convinced that any of Mrs. Kirchner’s mostly untested opponents could govern the rough and tumble political system, polls suggest.

But the defeat in Buenos Aires, coming on the heels of a setback for Mrs. Kirchner in a key provincial election and recent missteps by her government in areas ranging from soccer to human rights, have combined to remove some of the air of inevitability from her re-election bid.

Headline writers are no longer taking the liberties they did when Mrs. Kirchner announced her campaign in June, when the boldest pronounced: Cristina ya ganó, Cristina already won.

“I still think there’s an extremely strong likelihood that she’s going to be re-elected, but she’s going to have to work at it more,” said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University.

Mr. Jones noted that the president still benefits from the power of the purse in a fast-growing economy, as well as from more media exposure than her opponents can access.

But he said the independent-minded Mrs. Kirchner is going to have to lean more heavily than she would like to on the vote-mobilizing capacity of leaders of her Peronist party in massive Buenos Aires Province—including Gov. Daniel Scioli.

And the recent setbacks will pressure Mrs. Kirchner to make a good showing in a primary election set for Aug. 14, which is designed to winnow out candidates from smaller parties.

Aníbal Fernández, Mrs. Kirchner’s cabinet chief, noted on Monday that the capital has always been a tough electoral battleground for the president, but that at a national level, she maintains strong support.

One earlier sign of Mrs. Kirchner’s political challenges came in a gubernatorial election in July in the province of Santa Fe, a huge agrarian powerhouse. The win by the socialist Antonio Bonfatti wasn’t so surprising. Unexpected was the strong second-place finish by the conservative, Miguel Del Sel, a well-known comic actor, and the weak third-place showing by Mrs. Kirchner’s candidate, Agustín Rossi.

Analysts said that Mrs. Kirchner’s frequent feuds with farmers, which started when she tried to raise the grain-export tax in 2008, cost her Santa Fe ally at the polls. In the coming gubernatorial election in the big farming province of Córdoba, Mrs. Kirchner’s faction of the Peronist party doesn’t even have a candidate running.

Even the government’s increasing involvement in Argentina’s soccer league has lately caused it headaches. In 2009, the government television station took over transmission of games, elbowing out a joint venture involving media giant Grupo Clarín, a bitter Kirchner opponent.

Last month, after the fabled River Plate soccer club was relegated to second-division status for the first time in its 110-year history, the Argentine Soccer Association, with evident government backing, came up with a response that seemed only to make a bad situation worse.

The plan was to merge the top two divisions, with the idea of giving a boost to River Plate, an association spokesman acknowledged. Analysts said the restructuring also was intended to win TV ratings and political plaudits for the government and Mrs. Kirchner.

But many Argentine soccer purists fiercely rejected the apparent meddling in the game, and late Monday, the Soccer Association said it was dropping the unpopular idea.

The government’s image also has been hit by problems involving some of the human-rights groups that Mrs. Kirchner and her late husband and predecessor, Néstor, have counted on as pillars of support.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group representing victims of the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, is caught up in a messy investigation of alleged misappropriation of public funds for low-income housing. Mr. Macri maintained the scandal damaged the Filmus campaign. “People are fed up with the squandering of public resources,” he told a Buenos Aires radio station. “These things irritate and anger people.”

Mrs. Kirchner also was burned by an alliance with another rights group, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which has carried on a long-running battle with Grupo Clarín. The Grandmothers and the Kirchner government spent several years pressing the two adopted heirs of the company to take DNA tests to prove that they weren’t stolen from victims of the military dictatorship in the 1970s.

Finally, in July, DNA samples of the Clarín heirs were crossed with a genetic database of victims of the dictatorship and no matches were found. Members of Congress and the Argentine media lashed out at the Grandmothers and Mrs. Kirchner for having harassed the heirs without cause.