by michael soltys
Herald staff

A full day after Sunday’s polls closed, it is possible to give a complete picture of the new Congress and fill in any gaps in yesterday's electoral information.
The 127 deputies elected on Sunday ran under no less than 27 different labels. These can be subgrouped as follows:
27 deputies belonging to the Victory Front government party, 20 deputies belonging to the Unión PRO alliance of dissident Peronists and centre-right PRO (including five strictly PRO deputies in this city), 15 other deputies describing themselves as Peronist/Justicialist (generally anti-Kirchner or independent) and 12 deputies belonging to single-province Peronist-led parties (including four with Carlos Reutemann’s Santa Fe Federal Alliance).
The chief opposition force was the Civic and Social Accord (ACS), which elected 20 deputies in nine districts. A further 15 deputies of generally Radical origin respond largely to provincial governments, four describe themselves as Radicals while four more (in Santiago del Estero and Río Negro) are pro-Kirchner.
The spectrum is completed by six leftists (headed by Fernando “Pino” Solanas and Martín Sabbatella) and four others (including two of the Neuquén Popular Movement).
If we add these figures to the 130 deputies with two years still to serve, we can divide the 257-seat Lower House into a government camp of 83 Victory Front deputies and 16 allies (mostly pro-Kirchner Radicals), a dissident or independent Peronist field (plus PRO) of 57 seats, a Civic Coalition (ACS) caucus of 55 deputies along with 19 generally neo-Radical allies responding to provincial governments and 27 others — i.e. 99 pro-government and 131 opposition with 27 in between.
As for the 24 senators elected on Sunday, four were Victory Front, three were ACS, six were Peronist, two were Radical and nine from parties with the words Civic and/or Front in their name. Overall, this leaves the 72-seat Upper House split between 36 pro-Kirchner senators (including 32 who call themselves Victory Front) and 36 in opposition including nine dissident Peronists, 17 Radicals or ACS and 10 others.
Updating yesterday’s report on the city elections, we can give the final breakdown of deputies as five PRO, four for the Proyecto Sur of “Pino” Solanas, three for the Civic and Social Accord (including its leader Elisa Carrió, whose seat was in doubt at press time on Sunday) and just Carlos Heller for the Victory Front. At press time on Sunday we had PRO’s lead in doubt in three of the 15 communes but in the end City Mayor’s Mauricio Macri’s party only trailed in the 15th commune (the Paternal/Chacarita area, won by Solanas).
The 60-seat City legislature saw PRO with exactly the same 26-seat total as before with both the Victory Front opposition and single-seat parties losing ground to third parties. Pro-Kirchner legislators slumped from 13 to eight, Solanas erupted into the assembly with eight legislators and the Civic Coalition and ex-mayor Aníbal Ibarra each picked up a seat, rising to eight and five respectively. Only half the 10 single-seat parties now survive.
Despite his stinging defeat in Buenos Aires province, Néstor Kirchner won in Greater Buenos Aires with a reduced margin, carrying 18 of the 28 districts (with an absolute majority only in José Clemente Paz). Morón Mayor Martín Sabbatella won in his district while Unión-Pro took the others, including Lanús, San Fernando, San Isidro, San Martín, San Miguel, San Vicente, Tres de Febrero and Vicente López.
In the rest of the country, the most important items to update yesterday’s election night edition are to confirm the victory of Santa Fe Peronist Senator Carlos Reutemann (even if his Lower House list trailed the Socialist-Radical alliance by just 158 votes with 98.3 percent of the 5,873 precincts reporting) and the upset defeat of Kirchner’s Victory Front in his home province of Santa Cruz.