The closing of the final scrutiny in the City of Buenos Aires this Friday settled one of the loudest controversies of the post-election week: Martín Lousteau will retain his seat in Deputiesdespite the insistent claims of Freedom Advances (LLA)who claimed to have displaced him in the count. The Buenos Aires senator and president of the UCR will change venues in December, going from the Upper House to the Lower House.
The final result confirmed the trend of the provisional count, The radical won by a difference of 8,688 votesinsufficient for the libertarians to add one more seat under the electoral structure of the D’Hondt system. “We increased 1,294 votes in the final count. And LLA was missing 8,688 to obtain another deputy,” said Lousteau.
The dispute had become especially tense in the previous days. Since Thursday, when only seven of the fifteen Buenos Aires communes had been counted, libertarian leaders began to leak versions that considered the candidate the winner. Valeria Rodrigues Trimarchi —eighth on the LLA list—, a rumor amplified on networks by the usual digital militants of the ruling party. Some journalists even supported that hypothesis until Friday morning, when the final numbers disproved that possibility.
“During these five days we have had to endure grievances and an unprecedented disinformation campaign by the ruling party, which stated that our deputation was at risk when it was not,” Lousteau responded harshly, as soon as the official confirmation was known, on X (ex Twitter). He also assured that his team chose silence “because we believe in the institutions and we knew what the result was thanks to the work of our prosecutors.”
The former Minister of Economy of Cristina Kirchner obtained a total 99,034 votesequivalent to 6% of the Buenos Aires registrya percentage that had already left him on the verge of entry in the provisional count. That narrowness fueled the libertarian illusion of taking over the bank, a scenario that Patricia Bullrich He came to take it for granted in his speech on election Sunday, when he mentioned that his space had won eight seats.
On Thursday night, as speculation multiplied, the deputy Emiliano Yacobitti had come out at the crossroads of libertarian versions: “La Libertad Avanza is running a campaign lying to the people. Lousteau is going to be a deputy. The exact difference will be known tomorrow, but there will be thousands of votes. Enjoy that they won and worry about governing,” the leader linked to university radicalism published on networks.
Finally, the final scrutiny ratified what was stated in the provisional one. Lousteau, with 99,034 votes to his credit, celebrated with a message addressed to his voters: “Almost one hundred thousand Buenos Aires citizens chose our proposal to represent them as a national deputy.” And with the same phrase with which the controversy began, he closed the chapter: “We increased 1,294 votes. And LLA was missing 8,688.”
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