Tag Archives: kirchnerismo

Argentina

What Macri’s win in Argentina means for Latin America

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macri

Though I’m in Rome (and Malta and Napoli for the week), I write for The National Interest tomorrow about the implications of outgoing Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri’s victory in Argentina’s presidential election.argentina

The piece argues that former Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri’s victory (and the first defeat of kirchnerismo since its arrival in Argentine politics in 2003) is a game-changer for Latin American politics for three reasons — by restoring fiscal and monetary sanity to Argentina, paving the way for a wave of pent-up investment; by ending Argentina’s standoff with its creditors and bringing the country back into global debt markets; and by isolating the anti-democratic populist left, including Venezuela, where questionable and unfair legislative elections will take place Dec. 6.

Read it all here.

Argentina

Macri, Argentine opposition flex muscle as November runoff looms

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Opposition presidential candidate Mauricio Macri and María Eugenia Vidal, now governor-elect of Buenos Aires province, celebrate on the night of the August primaries.
Opposition presidential candidate Mauricio Macri and María Eugenia Vidal, now governor-elect of Buenos Aires province, celebrate on the night of the August primaries.

When Daniel Scioli emerged on Sunday night to declare victory in the first round of Argentina’s presidential election, it was clear that he did not expect to win the presidency outright and that he would face a runoff — even though no official election results were yet announced.argentina

When the first results finally came at around 11 p.m., they showed a far closer race than anyone predicted. At one point, Scioli’s rival, outgoing Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri, was actually leading Scioli. Ultimately, Scioli narrowly won the presidential election’s first round, but Macri’s support was so unexpectedly strong that he now enters the presidential runoff campaign as the odds-on favorite to end 12 consecutive years of kirchnersimo.

At stake in the presidential showdown is the legacy of one of the most important bastions of Latin America’s populist, statist left.

argentinapres

Macri, the candidate of the center-right Cambiemos (Spanish for ‘Let’s change’) coalition, has gradually expanded a political movement that was once limited to just the most affluent corners of Argentina’s capital. The son of an Italian immigrant, Macri joined his father’s business in the automobile sector before becoming the president of the popular Boca Juniors football club. He first entered politics in 2003, waging a failed run to become mayor of Buenos Aires. He lost that race, but he used the experience to form a new urban, liberal political party, Propuesta Republicana (PRO, Republican Proposal) in 2005 and, two years later, he won the mayoral election.

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RELATED: Kirchner 2019 comeback could
complicate Scioli presidential bid

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As the standard-bearer of the Cambiemos coalition, he merged his own Buenos Aires-based movement with the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR, Radical Civil Union), a long-lived liberal party that has stood as a contrast for decades to the dominant left-wing populist peronismo. Most voters believe that Macri is the candidate most likely to lift capital controls and bring Argentina back into global debt markets, even if it means a peso devaluation and strong measures to tamp down inflation. Nevertheless, with economic neoliberalism still widely discredited after the economic crisis of 1999-2001, Macri has taken efforts to reassure that he will not subject the Argentine economy to immediate radical change, and he’s even gone out of his way to praise the values of peronismo.

Despite doubts, the Macri campaign’s plan seems to be working. He swept the city of Buenos Aires, along with the provinces of Mendoza, Córdoba, Santa Fe and Entre Rios in Sunday’s vote.

Scioli leads departments shown in blue; Macri in orange; and Massa in violet. (Clarin)
Scioli leads departments shown in blue; Macri in orange; and Massa in violet. (Clarin)

His success in Sunday’s general election took Argentines somewhat by surprise. When election day began, it was conceivable that Scioli, a former vice president and currently the governor of Buenos Aires province, might have scored a first-round victory in the presidential race. He boasted the support of outgoing president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the governing Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory), an electoral coalition anchored by Argentina’s peronista ‘Justicialist’ Party. A former motorboat racing star, Scioli took a lead in polls early in 2015, and he’s consistently held an advantage to become Argentina’s next president. Despite rampant inflation, health scares, political intrigue and a slowing economy, Kirchner’s approval ratings have generally improved over the course of the last year — so much so that everyone expects her to try to return to the Casa Rosada in the 2019 election. Most recently, in Argentina’s compulsory open presidential primaries on August 9, Scioli won 38.4% of the vote versus just 30.1% for Cambiemos.

What a difference two months can make. Continue reading Macri, Argentine opposition flex muscle as November runoff looms →

Argentina, Buenos Aires

Tight Buenos Aires victory slightly complicates Macri’s presidential hopes

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In one of the most important tests before Argentina’s general election, the hand-picked successor of outgoing Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri, the chief center-right presidential candidate, only narrowly won a July 19 mayoral runoff.buenosairesargentina

Just three weeks out from Argentina’s crucial national presidential primary, the Buenos Aires mayoral results are being reported as a drag on Macri’s presidential campaign, and that’s true — to a degree. Macri’s long-serving chief of cabinet, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (pictured above, left, with Macri, right), garnered just 51.6% of the vote in a two-way race he was once expected to win easily by a double-digit margin. So while Rodríguez Larreta’s victory extends a three-term governing streak for Macri’s conservative Propuesta Republicana (PRO, Republican Proposal), it fell too far short of expectations. After all, Buenos Aires is the PRO’s heartland — Macri’s reach barely extends beyond the city to the larger Buenos Aires province, let alone the rest of the country.

With an open presidential primary taking place on August 9, however, and the October 25 presidential and parliamentary elections following shortly thereafter, the city’s mayoral election was a key test for Macri, who is trying to succeed Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, herself term-limited from seeking reelection.

Macri essentially occupies the conservative side of the presidential campaign — he hopes to win by picking up support from Argentine moderates and disenchanted kirchneristas without seeming too neoliberal. The winner of the 2015 election will be the first president in 12 years not to be a member of the Kirchner family, and Argentine voters may be ready for a modest change after the 21st century version of peronismo, as personified by the late Néstor Kirchner and his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who hopes to guide the ruling Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory) to yet another term.

Macri, for his part, wants to contrast the strength of his eight-year stewardship of the relatively wealthier city against the record of the FpV’s 2015 presidential candidate, Daniel Scioli, since 2007 the governor of the surrounding (and more impoverished) Buenos Aires province, and of Tigre mayor Sergio Massa, another center-left peronista who broke in 2013 with kirchnerismo to form the Frente Renovador (FR, Renewal Front).

It’s no surprise, by the way, that three politicians from the Buenos Aires region are vying for the presidency — the city, an autonomous federal district, together with the Buenos Aires province, is home to nearly 50% of Argentina’s 41.5 million citizens.

Argentina’s Goldilocks election

All three candidates — Scioli, Massa and Macri — have indicated they would pursue a more investment-friendly administration, and Macri, in particular, benefits from heading the most business-friendly government during the Kirchner era.

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RELATED: Everything you need to know about
Argentina’s impending default

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Macri nevertheless emphasizes that he’ll introduce only gradual shifts in policy, lest voters worry he’ll return to the economic policies of the disastrous 1990s.

Presumably to win Fernández de Kirchner’s support, Scioli last month named as his running mate Carlos Zannini, a fierce Kirchner loyalist who has served as the president’s legal secretary since 2003. But Scioli has emphasized that he wants to remove, however slowly, the capital controls of the Kirchner era, and to govern in a less interventionist and inflammatory manner.

Massa has positioned himself in between Scioli and Macri and, though his poll numbers seem to have dipped, seemed like the wide frontrunner following his breakout performance throughout Buenos Aires province in the October 2013 midterm elections.

Why the Buenos Aires mayoral race probably
won’t be important to the October election

While there are a lot of reasons why Macri could still lose the presidential race, it’s not particularly clear that either Scioli and the governing FpV or the upstart Massa should take too much comfort from the Buenos Aires mayoral election.

Continue reading Tight Buenos Aires victory slightly complicates Macri’s presidential hopes →

Argentina, Venezuela

Will Venezuela or Argentina be the first to crumble into economic crisis?

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kirchnermaduro

I write tomorrow for The National Interest about the dual economic crises in Venezuela and Argentina.argentinaVenezuela Flag Icon

The similarities between the two economic crises are uncanny — inflation, capital controls, dollar shortages, overvalued currencies, shortages, etc.

But the similarities don’t stop there.  Both countries currently fee political limitations to force policy changes to avert crisis — and that limit the political capital of the leaders of both countries, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, to enact reforms:

Accordingly, normal political channels seem blocked through at least the end of 2015, despite the fact that both countries should be considering massive economic policy u-turns that will require significant amounts of political goodwill neither Maduro nor Fernández de Kirchner possess. But there’s an even greater inertia lurking beyond even the routine political impasse—a kind of political dead-hand control in both countries, on both a short-term and long-term basis.

First, both Venezuela and Argentina remain tethered to the political ideologies of chavismoand kirchnerismo, even though their proponents, Chávez and Néstor Kirchner, are now dead. Those policies may have worked over the last decade to achieve certain goals, including greater social welfare and poverty reduction in Venezuela and a rapid return to economic growth and competitive exports for Argentina. But it should be clear by now that chavismoand kirchnerismo are unable to provide answers to their respective countries’ economic woes today.

Even more broadly, I argue that beyond the shortcomings of chavismo and kirchnerismo, Venezuela faces a long-term resources curse and Argentina faces the long-term legacy of protectionism and statism of peronismo, which in each case underlie the current economic crises.  What’s more, the IMF-sponsored reforms in 1989 that led to the massive Caracazo riots in Venezuela and the IMF-approved lending tied to Argentina’s 1990s ‘convertibility’ crisis that led to the 1999-2001 peso crisis have undermined orthodox economic policymaking:

What’s more, ill-conceived attempts to rupture those dominant paradigms through orthodox ‘Washington consensus’ reform processes led to economic and political disaster. In both countries, leaders experimented with neoliberalism, facilitated by the misguided zeal of the International Monetary Fund, without enacting any corresponding safety nets or shock absorbers. The resulting crises led both countries to double down on their prevailing ideologies, thereby, ironically, making economic reform today even more difficult.

In both cases, the political, historical and economic legacies have prevented the broadly moderate, business-friendly, social democratic middle courses that much of the rest of South America has embraced to wide success, including Colombia, Peru, Chile, Brazil.