The government officially initiates debate ahead of the election, with rising inflation as a background
On February 16, President Alberto Fernández (AF) formally initiated the government’s internal debate on what electoral strategy it will adopt for the upcoming elections. Effectively, the debate is about who will run as a presidential candidate in the primaries and what will be the coalition format of pan-Peronism.
AF's invitation to the leaders of the FdT to participate in the so-called "mesa política” shows his intention to set up a more organic or partisan negotiation framework, in the hope of depersonalizing a decision mechanism that in the past had been dominated by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK). As a matter of fact, President AF is a clear example of such a unilateral decision process as he was unexpectedly announced in May 2019 as the presidential candidate of the FdT in a tweet from CFK, without any prior consensus mechanism within the party.
Whether the president believes that, for the good of pan-Peronism, the electoral strategies should be depersonalized so that they are not dominated by the judicial concerns of the vice president, or because this time around he knows that he does not have CFK's support to run for a second term and therefore needs to widen the decision mechanism to avoid breaking the FdT electoral alliance, is difficult to say. It's probably a mix of both.
But the president, who, at least since the midterm elections, has been in a constant power struggle with his vice president (often losing the struggle with CFK), knows that if he wants to have the chance to run again, and with more of his own political capital, he needs the support of the non-Kirchnerist Peronists, including the labor unions, to tame the Kirchnerists. He needs to submerge the Kirchnerists' voice in the “church choir” of broader Peronism, if not to convince, then at least to align the Kirchnerists.
But AF will have a hard time convincing Peronism that, despite being the incumbent president, he is a natural candidate for this year’s presidential election and that other FdT candidates should step aside and not run in the primaries. The Kirchnerists and even some Peronists want AF to step down. After all, as we've said before, he was an invention of CFK, to act as an electoral strategy to beat Mauricio Macri, not the result of internal political negotiations. And the economic and political track record during the first three years of his current mandate shows very weak confidence indices.
The true obstacle for AF is the economy. At the same time as he is negotiating to ensure that primaries will be held, economic activity is showing signs of fatigue, and inflation is shooting up again after some months of deceleration.
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