Photo: AS Argentina

By Guillermo Alvarado 

The partial legislative elections held in Argentina confirmed that the most conservative right wing is still alive in that country, where the government of Alberto Fernandez lost, as feared, the majority it enjoyed in the Senate and reduced its presence in the Chamber of Deputies.

Formal confirmation of the results is still pending, but it is already a fact that Juntos por el Cambio, the party of former President Mauricio Macri, won the elections for deputies in 12 of the 24 districts, compared to the nine where the governmental coalition Frente de Todos won.

In the balloting, 127 of the 257 seats that compose that chamber were in dispute.

Regarding the Senate, the defeat was less hard than expected, but anyway, the Frente de Todos lost the majority by dropping from 41 to 35 seats and the opposition rose from 25 to 31.

Although Macri's party did not achieve the legislative steamroller it was aiming for, from now on any legal project will have to be subject to negotiations and alliances, which will somehow make the work of Fernandez and his team more arduous during the next two years.

Also worrying is the advance of the extreme right wing represented by Javier Milei, a copy of Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil, or José Antonio Kast, from Chile, who won 17.03 percent of the votes in Buenos Aires.

There are several factors that explain this shift of voters to the right, which had already been seen in the September primaries.

The most important is undoubtedly that after receiving a country that Macri left in chaos, Alberto Fernandez did not have time to implement his government program due to the Covid-19 world health crisis.

The pandemic had devastating effects on people's quality of life, not only in Argentina but all over the world, and paralyzed a good part of the economy, especially in the important branch of tourism.

Added to this is the burden of the 45 billion dollar debt, which Macri contracted with the International Monetary Fund and most of which was dissolved in the meanders of financial speculation.

Finally, there has been an intense campaign by the mass media, sympathetic to Juntos por el Cambio, dedicated to blame all the ills on this government and to erode confidence in the executive.

The presidential elections are two years away, time that should be used by the duo Fernández and Cristina Kirchner to reorient the course and try to recover the people's faith in their project.