Everything that usually happens after an election has begun in Argentina. The next battle had already begun before election day had finished. Everyone proclaimed themselves winners. Sergio Massa (Unidos por una Nueva Argentina), who finished in third place, thought himself a winner because it was the first time he had run in a presidential election and he got a good result, 21.34%. The second, Mauricio Macri (Frente Cambiemos) with 34.33%, sees himself with a chance to be first. And the first, Daniel Scioli (Frente para la Victoria), with 36.85% , was obliged to look cheerful, though he had nothing else to celebrate, having won the most votes in spite of it being way below what he desired.

With this panorama, what we can say is that there is still no President. The first round served only to open the debate for the second. In Argentina, one only triumphs in the first round by 1) obtaining more than 45% of the votes, or 2) getting more than 40% with a difference of ten points over the second place. None of these situations took place. The country is already thinking about the second round, for the first time in history, on November 22, between the candidate supported by the present government, Scioli and the conservative Macri.

The majority of surveys demonstrated their incapacity to get the electoral preferences right in a country where society has changed drastically in a few years. There was no survey that dared to foresee such a narrow margin between the two alternatives after a few months, since in August in the PASO (Simultaneous Open and Obligatory Primaries), Scioli obtained 38.67% and Macri 30.12%. What happened between the results of the PASO and this election? What happened with the over 8 points of difference than has just been reduced to 2? What happened to the 54% that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) obtained in the presidential elections of 2011?

Some reasons that could help answer these questions are as follows:

1. The main reason, without doubt, is that Scioli was not the best candidate from the Kirchnerist project. During these months, government circles attempted to present the view that "the candidate is the project" as a formula to combine the figure of Scioli with what Kirchnerism was doing. All of the valuations of K policy and of the President looked very positive (over 50%) during the past few months. This being so, opposition political tactics were not characterized by confrontation. The campaign was not centred either on the nationalization of YPF, nor on that of Aerolineas Argentinas, nor on the successful restructuring of the foreign debt, nor on the public policy to guarantee social rights. Scioli attempted to capitalize on all this but did not succeed. He tried to be the candidate of the project but could not make it. There was too great a difference between the candidate and the project. Scioli is not written with a K.

2. CFK did not want to (or could not) be a determining factor during the campaign. The President was in withdrawal even before Scioli was named as the candidate. She hardly took part in the campaign. Nor did she succeed in finding a candidate more to her measure, closer to the K centrality. She did not join the fight, or she joined it and lost, or did not think there was a winning candidate in her cohort; or she was overconfident in thinking of the following electoral campaign, without having won this one. This "distancing" of CFK from the elections has had a high cost. The figure of the Vice Presidential candidate, Zanini, imposed by the President, seemed at times to be a candidate of anther party. More of an ally than an electoral formula candidate. The K proposal for the Province of Buenos Aires, Aníbal Fernández, was also not very well chosen in the light of the results: he lost the Peronist bastion to pro-Macri María Eugenia Vidal. In a word, we might say that the President did not win what was hoped for. So much so that, for example, her most symbolic and important organization of these years, the Cámpora, wasn't even present at the close of the Scioli campaign. In politics every detail counts. And this "attitude of remoteness" of CFK towards Scioli has subtracted from and clearly eroded the vote, more than had been foreseen.

3. Scioli carried the weight of eight years of management in the Province of Buenos Aires (36% of the electoral register), with his successes but also with his errors. He has a presidential profile, but a long way from the epic nature, the emotivism, of the K narrative. Scioli did not identify himself with the juvenile image that has characterized the Kirchnerism of these last few years. He is too twentieth century, perhaps, for the politics of the twenty-first century. His discourse is doubtless that of a more obsolete Peronism than that which has been molded by Kirchnerism. In addition Scioli chose to avoid confrontation: he preferred to speak as if he had already won. Thus he easily accepted the field proposed by the advisers of Macri (especially Durán Barba) to avoid the messiness of the boxing ring. And in politics, in the democratic electoral game, one has to get into the arena, and combat giving and receiving, with respect but also cornering the rival, questioning every statement. Assuredly, this will be the Scioli that we shall see from now until the end of this second round campaign. Better late than never.

4. The Argentine right has been able to reinvent itself. What had appeared to be an isolated attempt with Macri as a leader in the capital, has become today a movement with a presence in the whole territory. Macrism gradually found a place across the length and the width of the country. They first brought together a group of known figures not involved in traditional politics. But then, in a second moment, they have begun to weave alliances with the old politics (particularly with radicalism) to give themselves a territorial structure. Macri has been using the language of the twenty-first century, with the new tone of the cool right. Constantly avoiding confrontation, distancing himself from his own neoliberal past; knowing how to highlight everything proposed by his political adversary. He has proposed almost nothing new, in spite of having presented himself as the champion of change. His programmatic void was full of political marketing. This is the new strategy of the regional right that accepts, with sportsmanship and resignation, that the new common sense is characteristic of a change of epoch in Argentina and in a good part of Latin America. Thus Macri has managed to sneak into the second round with a real chance of winning. This election puts him on top; he has the wind in his favour. But his real chance of winning will depend in great measure on how he comes out in the ring with Scioli. At this time, it is a scenario that neither want. We will see what happens from now on.

5. The third party in dispute, Massa, managed to keep himself in the game, in spite of the two-party duel. Massa, in the past aligned with K and now more anti-K than Macri, managed to play on the importance of the helpful vote in this kind of electoral situation. He gatecrashed the party to stay. His discourse was a pendulum: right-wing conservative in everything referring to punishment of insecurity, liberal in economics. He was more critical of the role of the state than Macri. He looked for confrontation in the extreme, something that allowed him notoriety to express his political proposal. Having won 21% of the votes allows him to be a key factor for the second round. In his speech on election night, he set his price: to sell to the highest bidder. Although everything seems to indicate that he will end up allied with Macri, one cannot discard the idea that he will offer himself to Scioli (he is anti-K but it is not clear that he is anti-Scioli), or perhaps he will decide for neither of the two, explicitly, thinking more about what may happen four years from now.

6. Finally, there is always a key that means the greatest difficulty in attempting to explain what happened in an electoral contest, and it is what we call the people. In Argentina, in these years, the social majority is not at all the one which emerged from the crisis, from the corralito, from hunger and misery. The change is a complete change. And because of this, what society thinks, demands, imagines, asks, and votes for has been transformed. What was a social demand a decade ago is today (fortunately) a naturalized right. People want more, they have new questions, and this demands new responses. What is popular and plebeian cannot at all be conceived of as a static category. This is without doubt one of the fundamental focal points of these future years in dispute, between the attempt of a conservative restoration and the process of change underway.

These lines attempt to explain what has happened in this new Argentine political-electoral map after the elections. We now have to wait for the next round to know who will be the President after December 10 of this year. As of today, a new campaign begins that has nothing to do with the last one. Surely the final result will depend more on the Kirchnerist strategy than on what Macri can do. What Kirchnerism proposes and what Scioli decides to do will be the keys for what is coming. But that is another song.

26/10/2015

(Transated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

- Alfredo Serrano Mancilla is Director of the Centro Estratégico Latinoamericano de Geopolítica (CELAG).