In 1972, when Juan Domingo Perón had been banned for 17 years and lived in exile in Spain, the Peronist youth launched the proclamation “fight and come back.” It was a forceful and effective phrase, which organized the Peronist revolutionary movements around the campaign for the return of the leader. The return, the first, took place that same year and on May 25, 1973 Perón was sworn in for the third time as president after winning the elections with 61.86% of the vote. Half a century later, Kirchner’s Peronism has dusted off the “fight and come back”, but to convince Cristina Kirchner to give up her decision not to run for office in the elections next October.
Kirchner’s decision was a consequence of the sentence to six years in prison and perpetual disqualification from holding public office that he received for corruption last December. Hours after her ruling, she accused the judges of colluding with the opposition to ban her from politics, as did the military that overthrew Perón in 1955 and forbade even naming him on the street. Kirchner is not prevented from being a candidate because the ruling against her is not yet final and she will not be final at least until the Supreme Court decides on the matter. The process can take years. For Kirchnerism, however, the ban is a fact.
In a recent interview with EL PAÍS, the chief of ministers, Agustín Rossi, said that it is not necessary to wait for the Court to consider that Kirchner cannot be a candidate. “We have already seen what Lula’s experience was like. He was skipping the impediments to be a candidate until there was a sentence that deprived him of his freedom. What Cristina does is not lend herself to speeding up the procedural times and what today is a sentence in the first instance becomes a final sentence that harms the entire political space, ”he said.
Kirchner has insisted that she does not want to be a candidate, but the crisis in Peronism stirs up the clamor. Kirchner is the politician with the best image of the movement and her followers have no intention of supporting the eventual re-election of Alberto Fernández, who in the best of cases they consider a traitor, when they do not call him useless or lukewarm. Meanwhile, Fernández delays the decision on a possible candidacy. Thus, he has Peronism in his grasp, and he does not imagine primary elections where one of the opponents is the acting president.
Kirchnerism no longer hides its discomfort with the president. And not only because when he refers to the banning of Kirchner he prefers to speak of “disqualification”, a legal term without political connotations. “I have doubts that Fernández intends for Peronism to win,” Andrés Larroque, one of the leaders of La Cámpora, the largest Kirchnerist group, said days ago. “He is constantly proposing himself for something that nobody asks for. But it is very painful to see that the president launched his candidacy based on Cristina’s conviction, ”he complained.
It was precisely from La Cámpora, chaired by Máximo Kirchner, son of the vice president, from where the motto “fight and come back” came out, to which they added “Cristina 2023″. This Saturday, her leaders organized a meeting in Avellaneda, a stronghold of Peronism in the province of Buenos Aires, to ask Kirchner to reconsider and become a candidate. “One and a thousand times the people will rise again and break the proscription and will bring happiness to everyone again,” Larroque told those present. It was an appeal to the Peronist mysticism. Kirchnerism considers that the Fernández government is a failure and that is why they have decided to oppose him from within, detaching themselves as much as possible from his decisions.
Kirchner made this clear in his last public appearance, on Friday, the first after the judges announced the grounds of the sentence handed down in December. The vice president said that in Argentina “there is no constitutional democratic state”, she criticized the 100% inflation, said that “there is no currency” and that salaries are “on the floor”. She also called to review the agreement that Fernández closed last year with the International Monetary Fund. She never named Fernández, the man she herself chose as a candidate four years ago, and when she should have referred to him, she called him “the one who came after” Mauricio Macri, in 2019.
Fernández, meanwhile, does not clarify if he will be a candidate or not. And the rumors set fire to the local press, which follows the fight in the presidential binomial as if it were a soap opera. During the past week, a news portal attributed to Fernández a phrase said in private where he promised to be “the one who ends 20 years of Kirchnerism” in the next elections. The presidential spokesperson, Gabriela Cerrutti, denied the veracity of such a statement the following day, but it was already too late: Cristina Kirchner accepted it as good. “In a off atrocities are said that are later denied,” he said. There are no longer bridges between the president and vice president and the elections are coming up without Peronism having a competitive candidate. As in the past, the “fight and come back” sounds again.
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