The Ferro stadium, full, explodes in the same cry. The most important leaders of all the tribes of Peronism in the country, including mayors, governors and ministers, have just taken the stage and the audience has only one slogan to chant. “Cristina presidenta, Cristina presidenta”, they say, stretching out the last two vowels. The priests of space, including Axel Kicillof, Pedro’s “Wado”, Gildo Insfrán and Ricardo Quintela from La Rioja, fold into song. Some do it convinced, others for convenience -like a Buenos Aires governor who needs her to compete to try to go for re-election-, and others because the circumstances do not leave them much more choice. It is Tuesday, May 16, one month and eight days to go until the closing of the lists, and the clock says that a few minutes have passed 6:00 p.m.
At 6:21 p.m., the chanted woman in the Caballito neighborhood uploads a letter to her social networks. “To the companions and the companions”, she calls herself, and she comes with a surprise that will fall like a bucket of frozen water on Ferro. After a long analysis, in which the vice president throws darts at the IMF, the Court, Mauricio Macri, the “hegemonic media” and Alberto Fernández, she makes a new nomination for a candidacy. It is the last chapter of a story that the bulk of the space and the militancy refused to believe true. Cristina Kirchner definitively ran out of the electoral contest. And so, as the bellowing chants on the West court demonstrated just minutes before her text was made public, she plunged headlong into yet another maze.
The problem that CFK now faces is not one that can be solved by adding support from leaders, ranting against some institutions or uploading ephemeris to their social networks. The former president faces what is perhaps the most difficult crossroads she has had to face throughout her long career: it is the challenge of how to dignify her flight, how to get her body out of the national elections, at a dramatic moment for the country and the world. Peronism, without losing its electoral appeal or its political capital in the process. Will she be able to escape her own trap?
Mousetrap. The first reaction from his first ring was utter shock. Perhaps the only person who has not been surprised in the slightest is Máximo Kirchner. The leader of La Cámpora had remained impassive in his thoughts in recent months and insisted that his mother would not change her position if she was not a candidate. In fact, at the event in La Plata at the end of April, he was one of the few who did not applaud or sing when the entire public chanted the “Cristina presidenta” that led the aforementioned to ask that the curlers not be made.
That had been a proclamation that some preferred not to listen to while others wanted to convince themselves that there was still room to make her change her mind. Among these were those who went to visit her or spoke to her in recent weeks, after the event at the Teatro Argentino in La Plata. Many had left her house in the Recoleta neighborhood with the firm conviction that she was rethinking her decision not to compete. “She had advanced her position in December with the expectation that some alternative would emerge in these months, but she did not appear. The Court thing is a pity, it demolished all the work we had been doing, it was about to launch itself”, says a leader.
According to those who had been in dialogue with her, the vice president had begun to open her ear to the much-mentioned operational clamor. The progressive erosion of the figure of Sergio Massa, who for that December 6 in which the conviction of CFK and his subsequent electoral decline was known seemed a promising option – he had managed to string together two months with downward inflation and there was hope of continuing on that path-, and the lack of growth of their own as Pedro’s “Wado” would have made her doubt. The first electoral results in the provinces, in Jujuy, Misiones and La Rioja, where the ruling parties were re-elected -with special attention to the last town where Peronism triumphed again-, were, according to this story, other reasons that made her start to rethink your decision.
Those who put this feeling of hope into words were Senator Juliana Di Tullio, Deputy Eduardo Valdés and Juan Manuel Ubeira, CFK’s lawyer. On Friday, May 12, the three presented a book about “lawfare” against Cristina, and at that event they posed for a photo with a mannequin head with a wig and curlers. Being the three of the vice president’s inner circle, many had seen a sign at the event that came with the textual slogan of “do the curlers.” They had understood that he had the endorsement of the former president.
Either way, that hope was short-lived. Cristina’s letter ended up knocking down any expectations.
Those who were in contact with the vice president swear that the decision of the Supreme Court to suspend the elections in Tucumán and San Juan five days after they take place was key in her reading of the board. “She read it as a direct message from Rosatti to her: if you show up, we’ll get you down two days before,” they say in her circle.
Among those who speak the most with Cristina, however, another line of interpretation appears. It is much less political or judicial reading than those that are usually made about her figure. This is personal. “She was changed by that shot that didn’t go off,” they say close to the leader. According to this version, the frustrated assassination attempt made some kind of “click” in his way of thinking: either because of the finiteness of life, because of how old he is, because of the granddaughter he did not see grow up, or because of stability. from the rest of her family, the bullet that fortunately did not go out did end up having a major and invisible effect on her. Those who support this view say that, then, the resignation of the candidacy should not be read only on an electoral plane, but also on a much more earthly one.
Crash landing. But, beyond the interpretations of those who treat her, the truth is that Cristina Kirchner’s decision opens up a series of difficult questions for the future.
It’s that the vice president was trapped in her own maze. From the death of her husband onwards, she built an ultra-verticalist movement where no one could argue with her on an equal footing and no one could grow to overshadow her, which also explains the lack of new K leaders with electoral power. It is a scheme that managed to prevail to the extent that it could be sustained as a valid guarantee of power and votes.
But in recent years this organization began to falter. 2021 showed that the Frente de Todos that she put together by hand and without consulting had lost four million votes compared to 2019. The furious economic crisis that continued after that mediocre electoral performance only suggests that the expectations of officialism for this year cannot be high.
Beyond the statements made by those who speak to her, there is an unavoidable reality. Consultant Jaime Durán Barba put it into words in a recent edition of NOTICIAS: “No politician who has a chance of winning gets out of an election.”
It is at this crossroads that CFK dam is located. On the one hand, the responsibility for Alberto Fernández to be president is entirely his, which in itself loads the inks on his figure. But the symbolic plane is the one that really puts her against the ropes: for almost fifteen years she built her character on the idea that she was one step ahead of the rest, that for the cause -playing with the figure of the seventies- it was necessary to give the life, as Perón, Evita and even Néstor had given it, that she personified the fight of good against evil, and of them against us. His ultraverticalist movement was built on this discourse, which therefore has a delicate Achilles heel: it is not that without it it can work but in a version that falls in love or works less -such as a Kicillof or a De Pedro-, but that without it directly does not work.
The operative clamor, these almost six months of public and private insistence on Cristina to review her decision, is nothing more than the empirical verification of this thesis. It is not that they want to convince her just out of affection or personal conviction: they want to make her change her mind because without her the whole scheme collapses under its own weight, which means that many councilors, mayors, deputies and governors will have to go out and look for work. starting in December. A party that was born so vertical cannot function without its leader. Especially if that leader does not run because he is forbidden to set foot in the country or because he died in his office, but rather he leaves his place due to a supposed judicial decision that has not yet materialized.
This is something that the K militancy knows and that she began to put into words as she became convinced that she was not going to compete. It is a feeling that was beginning to grow and that CFK’s letter ended up giving it flight: a claim to the boss, something that not so long ago was impossible to imagine from within the heart of K. “Cristina, you can’t do this to me”, humorist Dady Brieva launched him. “Cristina, you have been making a lot of mistakes, Kirchnerism has now become a conservative movement,” Daniel Tognetti said on his radio program on AM 530. “Today is a bleak day,” Victor Hugo Morales commented after the vice text. These are just a few examples of the reproaches that have been growing towards her. It is worth clarifying once again: all these protests are the logical result of the very system of thought and discussion that Cristina created and that put her at the top of everything. It is that scheme that she gave birth to that now turns against her like a boomerang.
And who is informed of this harsh climate is CFK herself. In fact, it would seem that her painstaking care in explaining the long list of causes that lead her not to want to be a “mascot of power” are, precisely, a defense mechanism against the expected reproaches. In fact, twenty days after communicating her decision for the first time, she organized an act in Avellaneda that seemed to have the sole purpose of explaining, again, more calmly and for more time, why she had ejected. “It’s not that I got off, they banned me,” she launched at that event, a message that was not for the red circle or for the other politicians but for her own militant base, which was still in shock.
That was a thesis that CFK tried to repeat later. On his social networks he uploaded a tweet with the same logic, and at the Teatro Argentino he insisted on the subject again. The explanation of the letter is there: as that meeting in La Plata demonstrated, neither the militancy nor the leadership had finished accepting his decline, for the simple reason that it was an oxymoron for this ultravertical movement.
That is also the reason for the long paragraphs in your last text. It seeks to build a narrative that is difficult to sustain: that the decision of the Supreme Court on Tucumán and San Juan was an intimidating message against her – when both Manzur and Uñac had completed the two terms dictated by the Constitution, something that even the Peronist José Luis himself Gioja admitted that it could not be done, and that she is “proscribed”, despite the fact that she has only one conviction in the first instance and that there is nothing that technically prevents her from being a candidate. These are complex theses to sustain as absolute truths, and the claim of the K base itself would seem to indicate that they do not even consider them as such.
It’s not just the arguments he gave in the letter. CFK’s decision to appear for an interview on C5N, in a format with panelists that she has never lent herself to since her husband came to power, speaks of the tactical obligation to continue on her tour of atonement before her voters . For now, dignifying the flight would seem like a chimera. An impossible.
