The Vice President of Argentina during her last public appearance on September 18. Gustavo Garello (AP)
One of the signs of the impending change of times in Argentina is the absence of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner at the top of politics. At 70 and serving a six-year prison sentence for corruption, the vice president will leave public office on December 9th. It will be the last day of a term marked by disagreements between Kirchner and President Alberto Fernández and a moribund economy.
The country’s most influential politician remained silent for much of the second-round presidential election campaign between the Peronist Sergio Massa and the ultra Javier Milei. His resignation cleared the way for Massa to distance himself from Kirchnerism, the dominant movement in Peronism for two decades. In his search for the centrist voice, Massa has done everything he can to distance himself from the government to which he belongs as economics minister.
Kirchner began the retreat on September 1, 2022, when a man tried to kill her at the door of her Buenos Aires home with a shot that never came out. Looking for a candidate for Peronism, Kirchner suggested a proper name in early 2023: Eduardo de Pedro. The Interior Minister wanted to fight against Daniel Scioli, supported by Fernández. In less than 24 hours it became clear that the power of the two-time former president (2007-2015) is no longer what it was. Provincial governors and other heavyweights rallied behind Massa and forced others to resign. The exception was chairman Juan Grabois, who was allowed to run because he was able to attract a progressive vote that Massa viewed with suspicion.
The vice president showed unwavering public support for the unity candidate and appeared with him in the same week to show the repatriation of one of the planes used during the dictatorship for the death flights in which three were thrown alive into the sea, the founders of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and two French nuns. Kirchner led the operation to internally cleanse the image of a cadre that Kirchnerists viewed as traitors during the seven years in which Massa broke ties and entered politics on his own.
However, this period of disagreement was crucial to the central goal at the end of the campaign: to show Massa as an autonomous candidate, without any conditioning by the politics that have denied the president leadership throughout his term in office. “Voting for Massa does not make you a Kirchnerist,” read posters put up on the streets and shared on social networks to attract new support.
Kirchner accompanied Massa for the last time at an election event in mid-July. Joint appearances with Fernández and even with representatives of the governing coalition Unión por la Patria (UxP) with a better image, such as the re-elected governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof, were also counted.
Massa assures that if he is elected head of state of Argentina this Sunday, power will no longer be distributed and will rest with him alone. “There was a coalition with transversal and not vertical distribution of competences,” criticized Massa in a recent interview with EL PAÍS when talking about the Fernández government. “I had no conflicts in my ministry because I made decisions from the first to the last official,” he stood out as a contrast.
Kirchner knows that it will be that way. Under a hypothetical Massa presidency, his power would be limited to a handful of lawmakers, including his son Máximo Kirchner, and to the province of Buenos Aires, the country’s largest. Their biggest concern comes from the legal front: the corruption verdict is being reviewed by higher courts, but in other cases the judiciary is also taking action against them over alleged money laundering and allegations of cover-up of the Iranians suspected of attacking a Jewish mutual society that Country left 84 died in 1994.
The vice president will appear again today in front of the cameras at the polling station in Río Gallegos, where she is eligible to vote. He was not in the UxP polling bunker on the night of the primaries on August 13th or during the first round on October 22nd. He will be missing for the third time this Sunday. As with previous election rallies, he will await the results at his home in Río Gallegos in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz.
He wants to return to Buenos Aires on Monday and fly to Naples a few days later. She has been invited to the Italian city by the Federico II University, where she will speak about the risks of democracy. In his speech he will look over the results of the Argentine election this Sunday.