One reflection of how divided politics have become is the way such previously automatic areas of consensus as the choice of the next Lower House Speaker have become battlegrounds. Even in the midst of the Kirchner counter-offensive following their midyear electoral defeat, there had been consensus over this post until recently with the main dispute over committee chairmanships. But not obtaining any joy on this front and maintaining that the government was not playing the game by the rules, the opposition strategy has been to join the dissident Peronists in laying claim to the Speaker’s bench — and curiously enough, the main pressure in this direction is coming from the Radicals, who are supposedly the main beneficiaries from the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner administration’s political reform proposals apart from the ruling party itself.

While the government largely defends its right to name the Speaker on the basis of its Victory Front still having twice as many deputies as any single opposition party in the new House, the Civic Coalition is curiously more explicit in mounting objections to changing the Lower House helm as potential coup-mongering. How real is this potential? This argument is largely based on the political crisis of 2001 when Peronist Senator Ramón Puerta became caretaker president for a couple of days in the same month he came to preside the Upper House after Peronist senators decided to flout the tradition of allowing the government to head both Houses of Congress and displaced the Radical-headed Alliance administration following its midterm defeat — a precedent doubtless present in Radical minds now. But the difference between then and now is that while the emergence of Puerta as the next in line for the presidency in the absence of a vice-president (Carlos “Chacho” Alvarez had resigned 14 months previously) increased the temptation to topple Radical Fernando de la Rúa, the opposition is already installed in the line of succession with Radical Vice-President Julio Cobos — an opposition Speaker thus would not substantially change the situation.

No doubt the future Lower House Speaker will just be another bargaining-chip in the general haggling over the political reform. While widely seen as the presidential couple’s bid to twist the electoral rules in their favour in order to reverse an adverse political situation, this reform can also be seen as a belated response to the 2001 crisis but in this atmosphere the public craving for more mature political institutions looks like taking second place to each side’s obsession with thwarting each other as the highest end.