By Michael Soltys, Buenos Aires Herald Senior Editor

Fears that the presidential couple might be given a second lease of life after their mid-year mid-term defeat have been rife ever since the first round of dialogue sparked a rift within the runner-up Civic and Social Accord but they have been confirmed by the way Santa Fe Senator Carlos Reutemann, apparently the most viable Peronist presidential hopeful for 2011, has blundered his way into becoming a one-man band. Somehow Senator Roxana Latorre, his co-senator for the province since 2003 and his Santa Fe Federal running-mate in June, found herself giving the decisive committee signature on Wednesday to permit the government's bill to extend delegated powers (including the right to set export duties) to go to the Upper House floor the following day, thus paving the way for the Kirchners' resounding victory - the Santa Fe socialist provincial government was quick to accuse her of selling out. It would seem that hostility to the government's agricultural policies is so important a part of Reutemann's bandwagon that he felt obliged to place as much distance as possible between himself and Latorre in order to convince the Santa Fe Rural Society of his good faith (not that he seems to have succeeded). But the price is a general impression that it is impossible to find even two opposition leaders pulling in the same direction.

Reutemann's route to the presidency has been enormously complicated by these contretemps with his own party and the farming sector because, in contrast to his racing-driver background, he prefers to advance by sheer inertia as the Peronist most congenial to the establishment. In any case Reutemann was probably the prime target of the government strategy of promoting compulsory party primaries as the core of its electoral reform because the taciturn senator would thus be fully exposed to the full weight of the Greater Buenos Aires Peronist machine and the public purse working on behalf of ex-president Néstor Kirch- ner with only limited access to independent support. But this uphill battle suddenly becomes much steeper and Reutemann looks isolated against other Peronist hopefuls who have yet to play their hand (something which Reutemann never wished to do, proposing ex-president E-duardo Duhalde as the front-runner in order to gain time).

One obsessive government argument during the election campaign was that a defeat could result in a power vacuum but now that this defeat has actually transpired, there seems far more danger of a power va-cuum in opposition ranks to the benefit of the presidential couple.