ARGENTINA’S FIRST couple suffered a crushing blow in midterm elections on Sunday, ending six years of political hegemony during which they had emerged from obscurity to dominate the political scene.
Argentinian president Cristina Kirchner’s candidates were defeated in all of the country’s main provinces in a vote to renew two-thirds of the lower house and one-third of the senate.
From December, Mrs Kirchner will for the first time face a congress in which both houses are dominated by opposition parties and dissident blocks of her own Peronist movement.
Her husband and predecessor as president, Néstor Kirchner, was beaten into second place in the battle for the lower house in the crucial province of Buenos Aires, home to 40 per cent of Argentinian voters and traditionally the main bastion of support for the Peronist movement.
Mr Kirchner, widely believed to remain the real power in the administration despite handing over office to his wife in 2007, headed the ruling block’s list of candidates in an effort to use his popularity with the Peronist base to offset anger at rising joblessness.
Despite being guaranteed a seat in congress, Mr Kirchner’s defeat by right-wing businessman Francisco de Narváez is a humiliating reversal for a politician who for much of his presidency was South America’s most popular leader.
Last night he said would resign as head of the Peronist party.
In a triumphant rally after declaring victory, Mr de Narváez told supporters “we have defeated the old and bad politics”. He was referring to what the opposition say is the authoritarian populism of the Kirchner era, during which the first couple aggressively extended the presidency’s powers at the expense of congress, the courts and the private sector.
The Kirchners’ candidates were also defeated in the populous and economically important provinces of Córdoba, Santa Fe and Entre Ríos. In Mendoza province, the ruling block was defeated by a list of candidates supported by Mrs Kirchner’s estranged vice-president, with whom she has not spoken since he cast a crucial vote in the senate last July to defeat her proposal to raise taxes on agricultural exports.
The proposed taxes sparked weeks of roadblocks by farmers and massive anti-government rallies in Argentina’s biggest cities, severely denting the Kirchners’ popularity and reinvigorating the opposition.
Such was the scale of Sunday’s defeat that the first couple’s candidates even lost in their home province of Santa Cruz, which they have run as a personal fiefdom since Mr Kirchner became governor in 1991.
In the traditionally anti-Peronist city of Buenos Aires, candidates backed by right-wing opposition mayor Mauricio Macri topped the poll. The result in the capital, along with his ally Mr de Narváez’s victory in the province of Buenos Aires, leaves Mr Macri well placed to be the leading non-Peronist opposition candidate in presidential elections in 2011. Mr de Narváez is barred from running as he was born in Colombia.