Leandro Santoro and Silvia Lospennato, two of the main candidates for the Buenos Aires City legislature, gave their final campaign speeches on Thursday evening in the final leg before the crucial Sunday elections. 

Santoro leads the Es Ahora Buenos Aires (The time is now, Buenos Aires) center-left Peronist coalition, while Lospennato will head the PRO ticket. 

The third leading candidate, presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni (La Libertad Avanza, LLA), closed his campaign on Wednesday alongside President Javier Milei. A scandal broke during the event as people claimed they were offered AR$25,000 to attend, but the payment never materialized.

The elections are important for a variety of reasons. First, it is the first major local vote in a year when national and provincial lawmakers are also set to be elected. Ruling party LLA and PRO view them as a primary between the two parties, and consider that whichever gets the most votes will have the upper hand in the negotiations for the upcoming national and provincial elections.

Secondly, the election will test PRO’s strength in Buenos Aires. A win for Santoro, who leads most polls, would mean the first victory for Peronism in the city since it became an autonomous district in 1994.

“If cruelty has become fashionable, count us out”

Santoro was the sole speaker in an event that took place in an auditorium of a national university. He began his speech by remembering the recently deceased ex-Uruguayan president José Mujica, saying that Mujica and his coalition stood for “the same humanist values.” 

“For those of us who are believers, [Mujica] should be next to Pope Francis, another great global leader who left us very recently,” Santoro said.

Next to a screen reading “It’s time to put a limit on them,” the candidate chose to polarize with both PRO and LLA, which are right-wing parties. He said the global right-wing had radicalized in the last years and, that while the center-left had some contact points with the right-wing, “that consensus entered a crisis.” He put both Milei and the PRO as examples of that radicalization.

Santoro also took aim against the current city administration of Jorge Macri, saying that they have adopted a policy of “abandonment.”

“It not only implies abandoning public investment, squares, sidewalks,” he said. “It implies abandoning people, people of flesh and blood, to leave them exclusively to their own devices,” he said. Santoro called this “market fundamentalism.” 

“Politics for us is social solidarity,” he said. He called the right-wing “perverse in the discursive construction, they try to deceive the people.”

“The right wing poses the alternative ‘it is us who represent freedom, or it is them, Peronism and Kirchnerism,” he added. “Is freedom at stake in the City of Buenos Aires? Can any intellectually honest person think that what we are discussing this May 18 is freedom?”

He said that what is being discussed is justice. “Social, environmental, and distributive justice,” he said. Santoro also said the far-right engaged in “hate” and “cruelty.”

“If cruelty has become fashionable, count us out,” he said.

Jabs at Kirchnerism and LLA 

Meanwhile, various leaders of the PRO right-wing party, which has ruled the city since 2007, took the stage before Lospennato at a circular stage in the 17 de Agosto Club, located in the Villa Pueyerredón neighborhood.

Among them were city mayor Jorge Macri and his cousin, former president Mauricio Macri.

Jorge Macri quoted The Eternaut TV series by saying “old things work” referring to the PRO party, which has ruled the city for 18 years. “The Buenos Aires city resident does not deserve a leap into the void into the arms of a Kirchnerism that does not know how to manage and wants to break this city,” he said. 

However, he also criticized LLA, saying “the chainsaw can destroy everything.”

Mauricio Macri took a jab at former party presidential candidates in 2023, Patricia Bullrich and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, who have both left PRO since. Bullrich is Milei’s security minister while Rodríguez Larreta is a candidate in Sunday’s elections, both for a new party.

“I know that the 2023 [party] primaries were very harmful, the two candidates allowed themselves to be corrupted by ego, but they are both gone. Out, bad energy, bad vibes,” said the former president.

Lospennato said the campaign was “not hard,” but “complicated.” “There are some who do not know how to do politics cleanly. But it does not matter. I do not believe that these dirty campaigns will end up giving results — Argentines and porteños are not fooled,” she said, referring to Ficha Limpia, a failed anti-graft bill she promoted. 

Milei accused her of the falling through, while others say the former president was behind the bill’s failure to pass in the Senate. She said that a version of Ficha Limpia can pass in the city’s legislature.

Lospennato added that her campaign consisted of asking neighbors which works improved their lives and that “the list was endless”. She named playgrounds, bus stops, security cameras, and others.

“You don’t campaign by making promises in the air, you campaign by showing how a good administration transforms your life,” she said, saying that Buenos Aires is the “city with the best quality of life in the country.” 

“If those who do not want violence, insult, abandonment are a majority in Buenos Aires City, there is no doubt that on Sunday the PRO has to win the elections,” she said.