It was a pike, launched with the sense of the formula of which she has the secret. “A scarf and a stick [présidentiels], it’s a little bit [de pouvoir] », darted Argentinian Vice-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner during a session of Eurolat, an assembly of parliamentarians from the European Union and Latin America, in Buenos Aires on Wednesday April 13. “We talk about power when a person makes a decision and it is accepted by the whole of society. That is power.” had just launched the ex-head of state (2007-2015). Implied: President Alberto Fernandez (unrelated) is a puppet. Were signs of rapprochement expected? With this outburst of perfidy, the crisis that is shaking the centre-left coalition in power is consummated.
The cracks in the Frente de Todos (“everyone’s front”), formed to contest the 2019 presidential election, are constantly widening, organizing themselves, beyond personal enmity, around two ideological lines, that of the president – more moderate – and that of the vice-president. The latter embodies the more left wing of their political family, the Peronists. It was Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, moreover, who, in 2019, made this astonishing announcement: failing to run for the presidency, she took a step aside, posed as future vice-president and nominated the candidate for Casa Rosada , the presidential palace: it will be Alberto Fernandez, with a reputation as a man of dialogue. The choice of this refocusing is judicious: if the ex-head of state has a base of voters with unshakable loyalty, his figure turns out to be much too divisive to cast a wider net. At the time, everyone was wondering: would “Cristina” pull the strings in the shadows, or would she let “Alberto” govern?
A debt that divides
Very discreet at the beginning of the management of the pandemic – the most brilliant moment of the president who then successfully installed the image of an educational and protective head of state -, the vice-president combs her own coalition, in a letter published in October 2020denouncing in a sibylline way “civil servants who do not work”. Almost a year later, the rout of the primary legislative elections in September 2021 still brings to light the internal dissonances. It is again in a letter published on her website that the vice-president indicates her requirements. She claims to Alberto Fernandez “to do honour” his choice to nominate him for the presidency. Part of the government was reshuffled on September 17.
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