The change of government in Argentina took another step this Wednesday with the meeting between outgoing Vice President Cristina Kirchner and her successor from December 10, Victoria Villarruel. Kirchner had planned to travel to Italy this Thursday to give a masterclass, but changed his plans after ultra Javier Milei’s victory in the second round on Sunday. Instead, he called the vice president-elect to his Senate office and they met for just under an hour. The meeting was described as “cordial” by both sides, but there was no formal photograph to capture it, unlike the day before between outgoing President Alberto Fernández and Milei.
“It was within the framework of the democratic, cordial and democratic efforts of both parties to achieve a transition for the good of the Argentine people,” Villarruel said as he left the Senate. “We didn’t know each other, but we were able to talk, get to know each other and talk about the problems ahead. There were no photos, but I think that citizens must remain extremely calm because we will carry out an orderly transition of the legislative power of La Libertad Avanza and the outgoing government,” Villarruel added. Kirchner avoided making any statements, although sources from his team stressed that there was a good atmosphere and management issues were discussed in a “friendly meeting” if necessary.
Kirchner’s silence extends the silence he maintained throughout much of the campaign after nominating Sergio Massa as his candidate. The former president (2007-2015), Argentina’s most influential politician so far this century, has spoken publicly only three times in the last four months: once for each time she took part in the primaries, the first round and the runoff. The last time was particularly short. “It was a beautiful day, we voted very quickly and I hope that we will know the results very quickly,” he told the press that he was waiting for her last Sunday while she cast her vote in the Patagonian town of Río Gallegos have given. “A day when people vote is always worth it,” he added, before leaving the country saying he would fly back to Buenos Aires the next day. Like the president, he was not in the Peronist bunker where Massa, the current economy minister, conceded defeat an hour before the country learned that Milei had won the election with 55.6% of the vote.
Victoria Villarruel greets this Wednesday as she leaves the Senate in Buenos Aires. Juan Ignacio Roncoroni (EFE)
Kirchner’s withdrawal from the political front began on September 1, 2022, when a man tried to murder her at the door of her home in Buenos Aires with a shot that did not disappear. Two months later, on December 6, a judge sentenced her to six months in prison for corruption, and the vice president dismissed all speculation aimed at positioning her as a presidential candidate for a Peronism already in crisis. “I will not run for anything,” she decided, and the coalition she had formed to return to power in 2019 with Fernández as president began searching for candidates.
The vice president was prescient early in the campaign. In May, in one of the few interviews he gave after his assassination attempt, he predicted an “atypical third-party election” in which “the most important thing” for Peronism would be to ensure passage into the second round. Four months remained before Milei, still an unknown, would emerge as the most voted party in the August 22 primaries, leaving Peronism in third place in this unprecedented third-party scenario in Argentine history. Despite the forecasts and the poor image of a government that is giving the country inflation of over 142% compared to the previous year, Massa reached the second round, but this was not enough given the anger exploited by the far right.
The economy minister ended up being the ideal candidate in a right-wing election campaign, but he was not the first choice for vice president. As his political movement awaited his word in that May interview, Kirchner revealed that “as a lifelong activist” he hoped that “the children of the ‘decimated generation’ will be the ones to take up the baton.” Before turning to Massa as a “unity candidate,” Kirchner spent a few hours encouraging the candidacy of one of them: Eduardo Wado de Pedro, son of victims of the military dictatorship. Pedro, 47, leader of the Kirchner Youth and current Interior Minister, was a one-year-old baby when his mother placed him in a bathtub as protection from the military bullets that eventually killed them in the house where they lived. . It was 1977, at the beginning of the dictatorship, and his father had been murdered months earlier. De Pedro will be a national senator when Milei assumes the presidency, and from the bench he presents himself as one of the leaders of a rebuilding Peronism. She will have a difficult time running against Victoria Villarruel, who will head the upper house of Congress as vice president.
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is voting this Sunday in Río Gallegos.STRINGER (Portal)
Villarruel, daughter, niece and granddaughter of soldiers, is the most conservative striker in the new government. His father, Eduardo Villarruel, was sent to the north of the country during a military operation in 1976 before the coup that, according to prosecutors investigating him, “opened state terrorism in Argentina.” Lieutenant Colonel Villarruel was never targeted by the justice system, but his brother was. In 2015, a judge indicted intelligence officer Ernesto Villarruel for the alleged crime of illegal imprisonment in the secret prison of El Vesubio, although he later decided not to take action against him because his health was unfit to stand trial.
Villarruel made a career as an advocate of what he calls “full remembrance,” the rehabilitation of victims of guerrilla attacks in the 1970s, but does not hide the fact that he visited the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla in prison. “I saw him with all his anger twice, maybe three times,” he said. Two weeks ago, in the vice-presidential debate, she refused to answer the Peronist Agustín Rossi if, as vice-president, she would promote an amnesty for the genocidal prisoners.
Kirchner took it up and avoided any public criticism, even though human rights policy was one of the flagships of Kirchnerism. From December 10th, she will be succeeded by someone who also wants to break with this legacy.