Argentina’s Election Won’t Change Its Economic Options
Whoever wins will face little room for maneuver.
The economic fog won’t lift for a while.
Photographer: Juan Mabromata/AFP?Getty Images
Former Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has always kept one foot on the balcony and the other on Mercury. In her volatile two terms in office, she picked fights with agribusiness, the International Monetary Fund, media empire Clarin, even screen idol Ricardo Darin, leaving Argentines the worse for her convulsions. Now, just in time for national elections, the willful Peronist is back again sowing disruption.
Fernandez was expected to stage a political comeback by challenging incumbent President Mauricio Macri, who after a bruising fiscal retrenchment is struggling with mounting debt and inflation, and sagging approval ratings. Instead, she startled loyalists and rivals alike by announcing her candidacy for vice president, on a ticket led by her former cabinet chief and later harsh critic Alberto Fernandez, who is not related. The maneuver rattled the political establishment and the excitable Argentine news cycle. Was Fernandez de Kirchner caving to the reality that she is too divisive a figure to return to the presidency? Was this a sleight of hand, with Kirchner playing Vladimir Putin to Alberto Fernandez’s Dmitry Medvedev? Or was it all an attempt to distract Argentines from her legal woes—her trial on serial corruption charges began May 21—just months before the balloting?