We have known for some time that the candidates for Sunday’s elections do not include any statesmen but some of the tactical errors which have been committed in the campaign give rise to the question as to whether they are even good politicians. It might be too much to expect the main candidates to engage in high-level debate (or indeed in debate of any kind) on the issues most worrying voters but they could at least be reasonably assumed to have the capacity to calculate their own narrow electoral self-interest accurately enough. Yet apparently not.

Examples of political ineptitude abound nationwide but let us concentrate on the Buenos Aires half of the country. In this city the explosive growth of the leftist list of film-maker Fernando “Pino” Solanas is as much testimony to the errors of his opponents as his virtues. Chiefly by Civic and Social Accord leader Elisa Carrió, who has obsessively pitched her campaign against ex-president Néstor Kirchner instead of City Mayor Mauricio Macri (a polarization which has not helped her cause in Buenos Aires province either) — her choice of former Central Bank governor Alfonso Prat Gay as the leading Accord candidate in this city has not been the right contrast with the centre-right Macri, thus enabling Solanas to move into the vacuum and jeopardizing Carrió’s own seat chances (even if it would take extreme voting shifts or a sharp slump for Macri’s PRO to change the current likely breakdown of the City’s 13 seats: six for Macri, three for Carrió, three for Solanas and Carlos Heller as the sole pro-Kirchner deputy). But Heller and ex-mayor Aníbal Ibarra have also contributed to the rise of Solanas by basing their campaigns on praising past national and local government records instead of criticizing the present. In the province, Kirchner, supposedly the master politician, has also run an error-ridden campaign, first building up his Peronist rival Francisco de Narváez by polarizing the campaign against him instead of playing “divide and rule” with a fragmented opposition and then seeking to compensate by praising the Accord list (instead of criticizing it to equate it with De Narváez).

Both sides stand to lose — the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner administration its majority in Congress while the opposition will at most whittle several percent off government support when presidential popularity has been halved over the last 18 months. But when the candidates cannot even run their own campaigns well, what right do they have to run our lives?