Economy, poverty keys to upcoming Argentina presidential run-off
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) – One is a former two-term president out to burnish his place in history among Argentina’s most influential leaders. The other is a provincial governor aiming for high office for the first time. Former President Carlos Menem and Nestor Kirchner will meet in a second-round election to choose Argentina’s next president. The goal: stewardship of an economy in tatters and a country with half its 35 million people in poverty.
Menem and Kirchner sought to forge alliances and win over potential voters Monday as the two Peronist leaders prepared for the May 18 election runoff. The winner will succeed President Eduardo Duhalde on May 25 for a four-year term.
Both Kirchner and Menem hail from Argentina’s governing Peronist party and both are certain to stake claim to the party namesake Juan Domingo Peron, a legendary and revered populist who governed three times, the last just before his death in the early 1970s.
But they are much different. Sunday’s result amounted to a political resurrection for Menem, who only 16 months ago was placed under house arrest in a corruption scandal. He was eventually released and the charges were dropped.
Menem insists he’ll respond with a Franklin Roosevelt-styled New Deal program of vast public works projects. He also supports free trade and foreign investment in Argentina.
Kirchner, standing just left of Menem’s center-right politics, favors defending domestic jobs and industries first – economic visions that resonate among a populace where one in five is unemployed.
Underlying the campaign has been the bitter rivalry between Menem and Duhalde, his former vice president. Duhalde has openly backed Kirchner, whose candidacy only took off after the president threw his support behind him.
Kirchner is expected to again tap Duhalde’s power base in Buenos Aires province for votes. No one has ever won the presidency without the province, home to 40 percent of the electorate.
Today the party Peron founded is fractured, and Menem and Kirchner are battling for votes among a divided electorate mired in Argentina’s worst economic crisis in decades.
“We feel it! We feel it! Menem is our president!” supporters of the 72-year-old Menem chanted into the early hours Monday after results gave him the lead.
In wind-swept Santa Cruz, a Patagonia province of sheep ranchers and oilmen, hundreds of Kirchner supporters also sounded jubilant. They banged drums and threw confetti after learning he was neck-and-neck with Menem.
“I’m bringing a cool wind of change from the south for a new dawn in Argentina,” said Kirchner, 53, Santa Cruz’s governor.
With nearly 99 percent of the ballots counted, Menem had 24.3 percent of the vote, compared with 22 percent for Kirchner.
Voters dropped three other major candidates. Independent free-market economist Ricardo Lopez Murphy finished third, followed by corruption-fighting lawmaker Elisa Carrio and Adolfo Rodriguez Saa, a Peronist who briefly served as caretaker president at the height of the economic crisis.
The economy collapsed in December 2001, suffocating under rigid monetary policies that triggered a government default on its $141 billion debt and a deep devaluation of the peso.
Political observers warn charges of corruption that dogged Menem’s rule are the biggest obstacle now facing the flamboyant former leader, who governed from 1989 to 1999.
Jose Claudio Escribano, of the daily La Nacion, said Menem will have a tougher battle ahead of him May 18. Surveys show about 60 percent of Argentines disapprove of Menem.
“If we look at the polls measuring his popularity it seems very difficult for the former president to return for a third term,” Escribano said.
But the results also showed Menem retains a considerable power base, predominantly among the poor and working class who fondly recall the financial stability of his rule.
The campaign is likely to become a referendum on Menem, whose campaign pledge is “Under Menem we lived better.”
“Why do I want to come back?” Menem asked at a rally last week. “To end, the hunger, the desperation, that no one else can. Only I can do that.”
The reformist Kirchner hopes to garner support of a middle class, long Latin America’s largest and most affluent and now devastated by the crisis that left many blaming Menem for their downfall.
Said Kirchner, “We’re going to build a different country than we had in the ’90s.”