PASO Candidates & more –29th June 2023

¡Buenos días from The Springs! This is the Rorshok Argentina Update from the 29th of June twenty twenty-three A quick summary of what's going down in Argentina.

There’s a lot we need to catch up on, as the deadline for defining candidacies for the PASO primaries has come and gone.

The ruling coalition Unión por la Patria, which used to be Frente de Todos, agreed on two tickets. First, Economy Minister Sergio Massa and Chief of Staff Agustín Rossi for president and Vice President (or VP) respectively. Second, the leftist social leader Juan Grabois and sociologist Paula Abal Medina.

For a hot minute there, Interior Minister Eduardo ‘Wado’ de Pedro was also going to run for president alongside Tucumán Governor Juan Manzur as VP, but his candidacy was dramatically withdrawn at the last minute. According to different sources, including the current VP, he wasn’t going to get approval from President Fernández. Still, some think the main candidate, Sergio Massa, may have asked for Wado to step down.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner backed Sergio Massa’s presidential bid, but made it clear that Wado de Pedro would’ve been the preference of her political space.

There was some speculation around Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof running for president, too. But he confirmed he will be running for re-election as governor in the nation’s key battleground.

There weren’t many surprises regarding the opposition coalition. As anticipated, Juntos por el Cambio presented two tickets: one led by Buenos Aires City Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and another by Patricia Bullrich. Larreta will compete alongside Gerardo Morales, who is the governor of the Jujuy province. Bullrich, on the other hand, has teamed up with former national deputy Luis Petri.

The third most prominent coalition is La Libertad Avanza, which presented only one ticket led by far-right libertarian economist Javier Milei and national deputy for Buenos Aires City Victoria Villarruel.

Two more coalitions will be running, including The Workers’ Left Front and the more center-right Hacemos por nuestro país. These two are unlikely to win as the former got about 2% in the last presidential elections and the latter is a new coalition, but they will probably secure a few seats in Congress.

If you want to learn more about each candidate, there’s an article by the Buenos Aires Herald that sums up their trajectories. Follow the link in the show notes to give it a read.

Speaking of articles, The Economist published one regarding the elections in Argentina. The article is titled Annual inflation of 114% is pushing Argentina to the right, and it explains the state of the political and economic battleground where candidates will be facing each other. The article goes as far back in time as to explain the origin of the Peronist movement and then dives into the economic proposals of each candidate, with a special focus on the appeal and risks of Milei and Bullrich. You’ll also find the link to this article in the show notes.

Since we mentioned a push to the right, polls indicate that investors are feeling optimistic with the election’s rightward shift. The fact that Sergio Massa, a centrist politician, was appointed as the main candidate for the ruling coalition is seen as a sign that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is losing power and that leftist economic measures are less likely to happen.

Another poll by the Clarín news outlet indicates that the opposition will take the lead in the August presidential primary. According to an average of survey results from seven polls, the opposition received twenty-nine percent, while the ruling coalition garnered twenty-six percent and the Libertarians got nineteen percent. It’s impossible not to suspect it may be biased, though, as Clarín is perceived as having a center-right political leaning.

Before we move on from the topic of the elections, we have to mention that both the Córdoba and Formosa provinces elected new governors, and they are both from their respective ruling parties. Martín Llaryora, who currently serves as mayor of Córdoba city, will be the province’s next governor while Gildo Insfran holds power in Formosa. Córdoba’s provincial government is Peronist but not Kirchnerist, and is not allied with the national ruling coalition. Insfran, on the other hand, is aligned with the ruling coalition and secured his eighth consecutive term in office.

While he’s still the president, Alberto Fernández traveled to Brasília to seal an export deal with Brazil. The financing of exports to Argentina could start imminently. In the next few days, the tender for the Brazilian-manufactured tubing for the second leg of the Néstor Kirchner pipeline reaching Rio Grande do Sul will be held.

Also on the topic of international relations, the Argentine government signed agreements with three Paris Club members to refinance the country’s debt: Spain, France and Sweden. These agreements add to the October twenty twenty-two deal with the Paris Club and bring the total number of creditors with bilateral agreements to fifteen out of sixteen, with Japan being the only remaining holdout. The agreements aim to ensure the sustainability of Argentina’s debt profile and strengthen economic recovery.

To comply with the Paris Club agreements, as well as those involving the International Monetary Fund, the government needs to reduce public spending. This is probably the reason why water, power, and transport subsidies are down fifteen percent for the January-May period, compared to the same period last year. The reasons behind the drop are mostly higher prices for power and gas as well as the establishment of the tariff segmentation based on users’ registered income.

We mentioned The Economist earlier, and we need to bring it up again because according to the publication’s annual survey, Buenos Aires is the best city in Latin America to live in. The study, which also places Vienna as the best city in the world to live in as an expat, rates cities according to their living conditions across five categories: stability, health care, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure.

If you’re wondering about inflation, yes, it is also mentioned as an element that could lead to further falls in stability scores. But for now, Argentina’s capital ranks sixty-six out of 173 cities and is the first one in Latin America.

If you happen to be an expat or a visitor in Argentina, you may want to know that those who use debit and credit cards issued by the Chinese company UnionPay will get almost twice as many pesos as before. After reaching an agreement with the Central Bank, the company moved from the official exchange rate to the foreign tourist dollar exchange rate, currently 480 pesos to the dollar.

One event that drew visitors to Buenos Aires City was the Federal Asado Championship. The competition featured twenty-four parrilleros representing different provinces and showcasing their grilling skills. The winner was Germán Caballero from the province of Formosa.

Meanwhile, another competition is about to start. Argentina’s national women’s football team is gearing up for the FIFA World Cup, which will take place from the 20th of July to the 20th of August in Australia and New Zealand. Argentina’s national women’s team has never won a World Cup, but there has been a massive transformation in institutional support for women’s football since the last edition of the tournament in twenty nineteen.

Despite not being favored to advance past the group stage, as they’ll have to face some of the strongest teams in the competition, the Argentine team aims to make a lasting impression in the tournament and showcase the progress of women’s football in the country.

In other news, a court has granted the rights to the works of the late Jorge Luis Borges to five nephews of the author’s widow, Maria Kodama, who died in March. It surprised many that his widow did not leave a will, and the absence of it put the rights to his works into limbo. In April, Kodama’s nephews went to court to declare themselves her heirs after her death, seeking to get ownership of all of her possessions, including the rights to Borges’ works and what are thought to be several valuable manuscripts.

Borges is considered Argentina’s most internationally significant author of the 20th century, so if you haven’t read anything by him, this may be your sign to check out his work.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for joining us!

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¡Nos vemos la próxima semana!