By Martin Gambarotta

By now you know that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is only liked by about 25 percent of the public, according to polls. The ruling party lost the midterm elections in June in key districts, including Buenos Aires province — you know that also. But what nobody knows is what will happen next. Yet it is looking more and more like Fernández de Kirchner has a fair chance of serving through until the end of her mandate in 2011. That’s news in itself because in the past other presidents have had real trouble staying in office when unpopular. Argentina’s institutions are notoriously weak, which is not a good thing for a President in dire times. Yet right here and now this country is not bankrupt, which means the national government can still get to rattle its coffer to discipline governors. The new hung Congress is scheduled to convene for the first time in December. For now the ruling party, even in defeat, is in control.

The Kirchners have been in power since 2003. Ever since Néstor Kirchner, the current President’s husbands and predecessor took office, the presidential couple has been ruling the nation at bruising breakneck speed. So fast, come to think of it, that in June they crashed. But the President is not slowing down. Yet, unfortunately for her, there is only the slimmest of an outside chance that she will regain some of her lost popularity. The good news for the Kirchners is that the ruling party — the Peronist-led Victory Front that won about 30 percent of the vote nationwide in June — has not fallen apart. Not yet anyway.
You don’t get to win a presidential runoff with 30 percent support. But it could be sufficient muscle for the President to ride the delicate political situation until 2011. Who knows? Maybe 2010 will be an excellent economic year and the Kirchners will shine again. It’s looking highly unlikely.

But the President and her husband are trying to change their likely political future: defeat in the presidential elections of 2011. But this is not 2011, which means that the President can still do things in a bid to survive.

Fernández de Kirchner on Thursday announced she had decreed an 180-peso subsidy for children and teenagers under 18 whose parents are unemployed or work in the informal economy. The government, the President said, will use about 10 billion pesos in pension money to pay for the subsidy. Parents will collect the subsidy on the condition that children are vaccinated and go to school. Congress, prodded by the Kirchners, last year nationalized about 24 billion dollars held in private pension funds. Some of that money, which critics say belongs to pensioners, is now being used to pay for the new child benefit.
This, the President said, “is the fairest way of redistributing wealth.” Fernández de Kirchner said the plan is “universal” because workers in the formal economy are already paid child benefit if they earn up to 4,800 pesos a month and parents on higher salaries are granted income tax breaks.

Elisa Carrió, the leader of the centrist Civic Coalition, had been recently championing a bill to grant all children, regardless of their economic situation, a subsidy of 200 pesos a month. The Argentine Workers Central (CTA), the nation’s second largest union umbrella group, had also been campaigning for years in favour of such a child benefit. The Catholic Church recently unveiled its own child benefit plan for children whose parents are unemployed or work in the informal economy. Nearly 40 percent of the workforce is currently paid under the counter, which means that many workers have no healthcare or benefits. Six million children are expected to collect the subsidy.

The President decreed the child benefit because she feared that Carrió’s bill could be backed by all the opposition, including a group of centre-left parties that recently voted in favour of the government-sponsored Media Law, and leave the ruling party in the tight spot of trying to shoot down the subsidy.
Carrió on Thursday welcomed the decree. But she said that the benefit will still leave the poor at the mercy of the territorial leaders of the Peronist party, especially in working-class Greater Buenos Aires. Carrió said the subsidy — because it will aim to register workers — could be manipulated by the pro-government General Labour Confederation (CGT), headed by truck driver Hugo Moyano. There is speculation that Moyano will seek to run for governor in Buenos Aires province, a traditional Peronist stronghold, in 2011.

The President recently announced a 1.5 billion peso plan to establish co-operatives in Greater Buenos Aires that are designed to employ about 100,000 people. Critics say the co-operatives will serve to boost the Peronist party machine and leftist pro-government groups that currently have a strategic alliance with Moyano. Key leaders of the pro-government groups attended Thursday’s ceremony in Government House, including Emilio Pérsico from Buenos Aires province and Milagro Sala from Jujuy province. Pérsico was forced to quit his Social Welfare Ministry under-secretary job after his son was arrested carrying plants of marijuana in a government van last week.

Jujuy Senator Gerardo Morales, the chairman of the Radical Party, accused Sala of recently organizing a demonstration during which he was pelted with eggs. Sala, according to Morales, manages about eight million pesos a month in national government funds “without control.” Sala has dismissed allegations that she is violent. She has been backed by the CTA that calls her a community leader. The President on Thursday warmly embraced Sala, who is now a demon to much of the opposition and an icon for pro-government supporters.

Morales said on Thursday that the opposition had finally forced the President to tackle the nation’s harrowing issues, including poverty. “We’ve managed to change the nation’s agenda,” Morales said. The Catholic Church leadership also welcomed the subsidy, but it underlined that it should have been the product of a law also backed by the opposition. Morales and other opposition leaders had accused the President of concentrating on abstract issues after losing the elections. Fernández de Kirchner in July had summoned the opposition to a round of consensus talk to discuss the reform of the political system. Much of the opposition, all but Carrió and leftist deputy-elect Fernando “Pino” Solanas, initially attended the talks. But “dialogue” quickly broke down.

Yet the President on Wednesday, only a day before she trumpeted the child benefit, announced that she will send the political reform bill to Congress. Wednesday’s ceremony was not attended by the opposition. The snub was downplayed by Fernández de Kirchner. “The important thing,” she said, “is for the opposition to debate the bill in Congress.”

The Radical Party, headed by Morales, has called the reform “a smoke screen” to keep politicians and the public busy. But Radical Senator Ernesto Sanz was forced to admit that he had discussed the political reform bill in backroom talks with Kirchnerite Senator Nicolás Fernández.

The meeting prompted speculation that the Radical Party would be game to an “Olivos Pact II,” a reference to the constitutional reform deal hammered out in 1993 between the late former president Raúl Alfonsín, a Radical, and then president Carlos Menem, a neoconservative Peronist. Radical Party bigwigs have since said they will flatly oppose the political reform bill, which replicates the system of open and simultaneous primaries currently staged in Santa Fe province, which is ruled by the Socialist Party since 2007.

There seems to be no reason why the Socialist Party, which holds 10 key seats in the Lower House, should oppose the reform. But Socialist Party lawmakers have said there is no time to debate the reform before December. The ruling party thinks differently and will aim to approve the reform announced on Wednesday as soon as possible, at least in the Lower House.

Deputy Francisco de Narváez, the centre-right Unión-PRO coalition candidate who defeated Kirchner in Buenos Aires province, has said that he reform is “tailor-made” for the President’s husband. “Kirchner 2011” posters were plastered on the walls of downtown Buenos Aires before the reform was announced.
The new system would force all political parties, even those with one presidential candidate, to field contenders in a primary to be held on the same day. A candidate who is defeated in a primary would not be allowed to run in the general election. Parties fielding a single presidential candidate must garner at least three percent of the votes in a primary to then run for the presidency.

Solanas has complained that the system will make life difficult for smaller emerging parties that gained popularity after the political and financial crisis of 2001, which many blamed on the Peronist and Radical old guard that has ruled the nation since 1983. The reform favours the “two-party machine,” Solanas said.
Kirchner could use the new system to discipline the Peronist party. Kirchner quit as the formal head of the party on June 29, the day after he lost the midterm vote in Buenos Aires province. But he is still in control of the ruling faction of the party. A reform would force the dissidents, who currently have less territorial clout than Kirchner’s machine, to challenge the former president in a primary. The dissident Peronists include deputy-elect Felipe Solá, Senator Carlos Reutemann and former caretaker president Eduardo Duhalde.

Solá, a former governor of Buenos Aires province who has not ruled out running for the presidency, has criticized the reform arguing that it is unconstitutional to force citizens to vote in a primary. Tight-lipped Reutemann, the circumspect former Formula One driver, has yet to comment on the reform.
Only Duhalde, who was recently shunned by Reutemann and De Narváez, declared on Thursday at the IDEA business forum in Mar del Plata that he was willing to face Kirchner in a Peronist presidential primary “and defeat him.” Duhalde’s real aim could be to drive a wedge in Buenos Aires province to ruin any outside chance Kirchner has left of winning the presidency in 2011. But Duhalde, the former chief of the Peronist machine in Buenos Aires province in the 90s, is not popular enough to win the presidency, according to polls.

De Narváez said on Thursday that both Duhalde and Kirchner represent “old-style politics.” De Narváez, a wealthy businessman who bankrolled his campaign, could be hit by the reform because it bans television and radio campaign ads paid for with private funds.

Ironically, the reform could be good for the chances of Vice-President Julio Cobos, the dissident Radical who last year sided with the farmers during their standoff with Fernández de Kirchner over grain export duties and is now a leader of the opposition. Polls show that Cobos is the most popular politician in the land, which means that he has the charm to run for president. He could also have the backing of most of the Radical Party to win a primary against any potential rival.

Cobos on Friday joined other Radical Party bigwigs in ceremonies to pay tribute to Alfonsín on the 26th anniversary of his presidential election win in 1983. “I never walked away from the Radical Party,” Cobos said on Friday. Cobos was expelled “for life” from the Radical Party in 2007 for joining forces with the Kirchners. But he has since been pardoned and earlier this week he said in a statement that he intends to rejoin the Radical Party once he serves out his mandate as Vice-President. Massive support by independent voters for Cobos, now the Kirchners’ arch-rival, in a primary could clinch him the presidency even before the general election.

Carrió, Cobos and the Radicals ran together as the Social and Civic Accord (ACyS) in the midterm elections. But it is not clear if Carrió and Cobos will agree to face each other in one same primary. Carrió on Thursday said she had nothing to fear if the reform is approved, quashing speculation that her party will find it difficult to garner three percent of the nationwide vote in a primary.

The reform of the electoral system could force all opposition leaders to show more clearly where they stand and could end up atomizing them at the wrong time.

Carrió, for one, is striving to end the identity crisis of her party. She has, for instance, openly opposed a bill backed by human rights groups that would allow authorities to conduct raids to gather DNA samples from personal objects, such as toothbrushes, to help identify children born to disappeared women during the last military dictatorship. Carrió on Wednesday was expelled from the APDH permanent human rights assembly for opposing the bill, which she claims has been maliciously designed by the government to target the adopted children of Ernestina Herrera de Noble, the head of the private media group Clarín.

De Narváez meanwhile until recently had said that he intends to run for Buenos Aires province governor because he was born in Colombia to foreign parents and according to the Constitution is not allowed to run for the presidency. But on Thursday he said he was “not ruling anything out,” meaning that he could take his case to run for president to court. A shot at the presidency would put De Narváez at odds with his ally City of Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri, the leader of the centre-right party PRO.

Macri, who has yet to formally announce that he will run for president, is currently on the defensive over allegations that a Federal Police agent who worked for the city’s Education Ministry spied on a Jewish community leader.

The scandal forced Macri on Thursday to announce that the new Metropolitan Police will be headed by PRO Deputy Eugenio Burzaco, a civilian. The Met Police chief originally appointed by Macri, Jorge Palacios, was recently forced to step down over allegations that the blocked the probe into the 1994 bombing of the AMIA community centre. The Jewish community leader had his telephones tapped allegedly because he had publicly opposed Palacios’ appointment as Met Police chief. Critics have meanwhile accused a municipal agency, UCEP, of using brutal force to clear homeless people from the streets. A Macri administration minister has vowed to probe the accusations of abuse. Macri, who could be forced to reshuffle his Cabinet come December, was also hit by a teachers strike in this city on Wednesday to demand a pay hike and a higher budget next year.