Juntos por el Cambio (JxC)’s candidate Ignacio Torres has won the Chubut province governor elections with 35.7% of the vote, beating peronist coalition Arriba Chubut’s contender Juan Pablo Luque by just 1.6 percentage points. 

Late on Sunday, with results neck and neck, each candidate was claiming victory — but the official preliminary results, with 100% of the vote counted, state that Torres got 116,432 votes, and Luque, 111,203, a difference of just over 5,200 votes.

In Chubut there are no primaries or second rounds. The candidate with the most votes wins outright, meaning they can win the governorship by a very small margin.

Before the preliminary count was complete, Luque — who is allied with national ruling coalition Unión por la Patria — said that, according to his coalition’s numbers, he had won by 800 votes.

The definitive vote count cannot start until 48 hours after the election has finished, which will be on Tuesday at 6 p.m.

“Among 250,000 electors, a difference of 800 votes is very little,” Luque said. “That’s why we’re going to wait for the definitive vote count,” he added at his campaign house in Comodoro Rivadavia. 

Torres also declared himself the winner before the official results were in. “They want to confuse us because they can’t understand how this guy that you looked down on showed you how, after 20 years, we’re going to end the negligence in this province,” he said, referencing the past two decades of Peronist government in the province.

Declining voter turnout in provincial elections this year has alarmed analysts. In Chubut, participation was 69.2%, slightly higher than in other recent provincial elections. However, the figure in Chubut is usually over 75% for national elections, according to the government’s Political Electoral Observatory. 

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Infighting and reconciliation

Last night, both JxC presidential candidates, Patricia Bullrich and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, were in Torres’ campaign headquarters.

The pair have marked their differences publicly amid the campaign for the opposition presidential nomination in recent weeks. However, after Torres’ preliminary victory was announced, they celebrated together on stage and even hugged.

“On August 13 we’ll talk with Larreta and see who wins, but calm down for now,” Bullrich said in a joking tone.

“I don’t know if Horacio or me is going to win, but we’re going to make a change, all of us together,” Bullrich added.

The elections were also marked by Peronist infighting.

The winner is set to replace incumbent Peronist governor Mariano Arcioni. Luque is also peronist, but ran with a different coalition from Arcioni and, during his campaign, actively distanced himself from him.

“It’s not true that the province has been under a Peronist government for the past 20 years, because the last six years are not Peronism,” Luque said after voting on Sunday morning.

Arcioni became governor in 2017 after his predecessor, Mario Das Neves, died. He was later elected in 2019.
“I don’t feel part of the ruling coalition,” Luque said during the candidate debate last week, referring to Arcioni’s Chubut Somos Todos. “I have absolutely nothing to do with Arcioni, I see some people want to link me to him all the time.”