Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner denied having voluntarily desisted from participating in Argentine political and electoral life. “There is a ban here,” she said three weeks after being sentenced to six years in prison by a federal court in the context of a case related to the management of public works during her two governments (2007-15).
When speaking during a public act in the Buenos Aires periphery, Fernández de Kirchner repeated some of the ideas expressed the day her sentence was known, which has also included the prohibition to hold elective positions. In this country, she assured her, she governs a “parallel State that defines everyone’s life” and called on Peronism, the ruling party, to fight for “a democracy without mafias.”
The leader, who this year was the target of an assassination attempt, reappeared in the midst of a new and intense conflict between the national government and the city of Buenos Aires, administered by the right-wing opposition, and whose mayor, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, aspires to win the elections next October. Larreta is one of the referents of that space that celebrated the ruling against the vice president on December 6. In his opinion, impunity was defeated. For the vice president, “what they did was put together a trial with complaints, with an almost surgical electoral chronology.”
In his opinion, it was “a three-year armed trial” that has resulted in a maneuver to prevent him from freely participating in the exercise of his political rights. Fernández de Kirchner compared the ruling with the grounds that, when Peronism was overthrown in September 1956, prohibited “saying the words ‘Perón’, ‘Evita’ and singing the Peronist March.” The vice president called on her followers to demonstrate on March 24, the 47th anniversary of the coup, under the slogan “Argentina and democracy without mafias.”He argued in this regard that “40 years after the recovery of that democracy, it is not fair for those who suffered the consequences of the dictatorship or for the millions of Argentines who continue to believe that democracy is the best way to live among us.”
March 24, in the year that will celebrate 40 years of democracy, will be a very important date for us to mobilize all of Argentina based on a slogan: Argentina and democracy without mafias. We Argentines deserve it. According to Patricia Bullrich, another of the right-wing presidential hopefuls, Fernández de Kirchner “has shown that he lives in the past and that he has absolutely nothing to offer the Argentines.”
The institutional conflict
During her speech, the vice president questioned the Supreme Court’s decision to order President Alberto Fernández to raise the federal funds received by the city of Buenos Aires from 2.32% to 2.95%. In this regard, she indicated that the highest judicial authority “ignored” a law enacted by Congress that “consecrated the new distribution” of funds between the national government and the provinces. She recalled in turn that under the management of President Mauricio Macri (2015-19) a decree was sanctioned that granted the Argentine capital “the richest city in Argentina” Much more money than, he said, would correspond to him. Fernández tried to resolve the situation through another decree that was rejected in the Supreme Court ruling. “We are facing a fact that is not legal, as if the rule of law had disappeared” and which, he remarked, “influences the quality of life of citizens”.
The new public intervention by Fernández de Kirchner does not seem to change the horizon of expectations of Peronism in the face of the 2023 elections. The ruling party currently lacks a candidate. What he already knows is that his chances of retaining the Government are increasingly limited as a result of high inflation, of almost 100% per year, and the economic adjustment that hits the hardest-hit social sectors especially.
In this context, a new survey has been revealed according to which the far-right Javier Milei is in a technical tie with Peronism, which could leave him out of a possible second round with the right-wing candidate.
