By Michael Soltys, Buenos Aires Herald Senior Editor

Given the strong probability of the opposition running the show in Congress by the end of this year, there is an onus on its leaders to find some sort of consensus towards a broad coalition if a minority government is not to prevail by default and this common ground was certainly broken by Vice-President Julio César Cleto Cobos taking sides in the Peronist primary on Wednesday - ostensibly to show solidarity with dissident Peronist leader Francisco de Narváez due to the perceived campaign of legal harassment against him but easily interpreted as sour grapes over the exclusion of the ex-Radical's candidates from the ranks of the main opposition list in Buenos Aires province, the neo-Radical Civic and Social Accord.

That list's leading candidates Margarita Stolbizer and Ricardo Alfonsín doubtless felt all the more embittered by the Cobos flirtation with De Narváez because it had the effect of confirming the polarization between the two rival Peronist lists already achieved by ex-president Néstor Kirchner's counterproductive bid to smear De Narváez with ephedrine-smuggling charges.

Nevertheless, the onus on opposition leaders to come up with more consensus and dialogue to measure up to their likely future role should not be seen as an absolute responsibility in either formal or real terms. For a start Argentina is not a parliamentary democracy so that there is no obligation on any party to form a working majority so that a prime minister and Cabinet can govern Argentina. And in real terms, while there are far too many personal rivalries in Argentine politics on both sides of the fence, the need for consensus should not be stretched into a false unity which would force the centre-right PRO and the Socialists, for example, to see eye to eye. On the contrary, too much stress on the need to create a united front against the Kirchners might lead to the suppression of ideas (always a fertile field for differences), which are already conspicuous by their absence in this campaign.

Yet even on this basis it is vital that political rivals like Cobos and De Narváez should meet to identify the differences between them as much as the common ground. Furthermore, nobody is going to believe that parliamentary democracy and coalition government (almost inevitable with the current electoral system) have any future in Argentina if the slanging-match between Cobos and Civic Coalition leader Elisa Carrió over the former's meeting with De Narváez is anything to go by.