When Patricia Bullrich and Sergio Massa They entered the last week of the campaign, Mauricio Macri and Cristina Kirchner They were thousands of miles away. Coincidentally, the representatives of the spaces that are fighting to enter the runoff were in Patagonia for the long weekend.
Far from the candidates of the spaces they founded, with lukewarm support and facing an election with an uncertain result, former presidents predict their future. On Sunday the 22nd, a country model is put into play, but also, for them, their political and judicial situation for the coming years.
Plan.
Unlike Cristina, Macri has a plan B. If Patricia Bullrich is defeated, she will still There is still hope for Javier Milei, whose presidency might not be entirely uncomfortable for him: he has fluid contact with the La Libertad Avanza candidate and many leaders in his space doubted whether at times he threatened to play for the liberal.
For its part, If Sergio Massa does not win, Cristina could be complicated with her judicial situation and with her political project for the coming years: her wish that the Alberto Fernández government close the files that have her as the protagonist did not come true. She was even convicted for the Road Traffic Case and other cases will soon come to oral trial. It is an issue that worries her. At 70 years old, She is also concerned about the fact that she has not managed to establish Máximo as the heir to the K project. On the contrary, in recent days he has found his favorites estranged: his son and Axel Kicillof are at odds since the Insaurralde case.
In any case, neither Macri nor Cristina did much during the campaign for the candidates representing their coalitions to win. The former president took pity in the final sprint: She made a video supporting Bullrich and then, on Thursday the 19th, she returned to Buenos Aires to be present and speak at the candidate’s closing ceremony. It was the first act together post PASO. Until then, its appearances had been sporadic and its definitions gave rise to debate. The internal cracks in Juntos are still an issue to be resolved.
Cristina, for her part, did much less. She returned to Capital that week to hold a series of private meetings and take charge of the national government, while Alberto Fernández was on tour in China. But was the great absentee from the closing of Massa’s campaign in Sarandí. His contacts with the Minister of Economy were reduced to the private sphere.
The only campaign meeting between the former president and the Minister of Economy happened in mid-July, when they presented a flight simulator at Aerolíneas Argentinas. In that act, she came to show him that her candidate was Pedro’s “Wado”, but that she had had to decline her position. After Unión por la Patria came third in the primaries, it did not make any further statements about the candidate.
Cristina’s only public activity before the elections was in the judicial system. Her lawyer requested that the public drawing of the Federal Court of Criminal Cassation to elect the judges who will be in charge of the Los Sauces-Hotesur and the Memorandum with Iran trials be postponed until after the general elections.
Answers.
The truth is that the lack of support from the leaders of the spaces that will challenge Milei for power did not alarm the candidates. In fact, in both spaces the advisors advised not to stick too closely to the referents, whose negative images are predominant.
Furthermore, as former presidents, their presence could overshadow that of the candidate. “If they reappear publicly, there would be more talk about Cristina or Mauricio than about Sergio or Patricia,” analyzes a consultant. They are like magnets of public opinion.
For that reason, when Mirtha Legrand asked Massa about Cristina, The minister was quick to answer “I am the candidate.”. “We must understand that leadership, as of December 10, is my responsibility,” he wanted to make clear.
Bullrich usually responds something like that when asked about Macri. In the middle of the campaign, he even assured that “It is time to release Together for Change and for Mauricio to accommodate himself however he wants to accommodate himself”. His statements had generated a tremor in the opposition.
But the moment of boiling that the relationship had reached a month before the general elections began to moderate its temperature by the end. In the last stretch, Macri approached and even Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, defeated in the PASO, joined the team. A truce PRO.
In both cases, private contact is fluid, but publicly neither displayed a range of praise for their candidates. To find a statement from Cristina to Massa you have to go back three months, when the vice president told her: “You took charge in a very difficult moment and you didn’t wrinkle.”
Macri, with hesitation due to his statements in favor of Milei, turned the helm at the last minute to Bullrich’s side: “I ask you to vote for Patricia this Sunday. She will fight to take us down the true path of change. “It’s her,” he said in a video that her space broadcast hours before the electoral ban began.
It was a difficult campaign for CFK and Macri. But the greatest risk is yet to come: What they do not yet know is how they will be able to reconfigure their power after 2023.
