The inmate of the PRO has its correlate in radicalism. Perhaps with less belligerence, but just as divided. And this was seen in the election of the vice presidents of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and Patricia Bullrich.
To look at both candidates it is necessary to evaluate their specific weight within the radical structure and also their alliances.
Gerardo Morales, who will accompany Rodríguez Larreta, is the president of the national UCR and, as such, has a deployment of allies in all the provinces. To get to that place, conventional votes from the entire country are needed.
Luis Petri is younger and has a short career at the national level, but he is more famous in Mendoza, his native province. On June 11, he competed in the provincial PASO against Alfredo Cornejo and, although he was defeated, they recognized that he had a remarkable choice.
How did they get here? Morales had twists and turns in his relationship with Rodríguez Larreta. In the 2021 campaign, when he supported the neuroscientist Facundo Manes, who had a tough speech against Larreta, Morales, in an interview, defined the mayor of Buenos Aires as capricious. “He’s the chubby guy from the neighborhood who, when they take him out, takes the ball,” he said. By the end of 2021, he became the new president of the UCR National Committee, facing Martín Lousteau, with whom the tension reached the point that they almost clashed and even flew a glass through the air. All that past today is reversed. In the present, Morales is in a fight with Manes and friends with Lousteau. With Larreta the relationship is unbeatable and everyone works to win the PASO. A scenario unimaginable two years ago.
Luis Petri’s journey was less dizzying. Since 2022 he warned that he was going to be a candidate for governor and decided to make it official in February of this year. A month later he formalized his nuptial engagement with the famous journalist Cristina Pérez and faced the provincial campaign. After being defeated, Patricia Bullrich invited him to join her as her vice president.
Petri has in his favor that he complements Bullrich on the subject of security. In Mendoza, the Petri Law is well known, which prohibited temporary releases for those convicted of sexual crimes.
His political godfather is Julio Cleto Cobos, Cristina Kirchner’s former vice president and famous author of the phrase “my vote is no positive” in the tiebreaker of the vote for the law of mobile withholdings to the field in 2008.
Petri’s appointment surprised a sector of radicalism that had identified Alfredo Cornejo as Bullrich’s Mendoza ally. There was even speculation that he could be his running mate when together they made tours in the Buenos Aires suburbs. To add context: Cobos and Cornejo are adversaries in Mendoza.
Today Cornejo decided to remain neutral in the internal and take the two presidential candidates with the same candidates to the positions of deputies. Of course, his little heart is with Patricia.
Armed. Something that both PRO presidential candidates lack is a structure in the interior of the country. That is provided by the UCR. At the national level, his allies are governors of radicalism or leaders of provincial parties. In addition to Morales from Jujuy and Cornejo from Mendoza, there is also the governor of Corrientes, Gustavo Valdés, and this year the elected president of San Luis, Claudio Poggi, who has Peronist origin but is an ally of Larreta, joined.
In addition to Morales, Larreta has the support of Lousteau, and with the closing of the lists, the mayor of San Isidro Gustavo Posse joined.
Patricia Bullrich has, in addition to Petri from Mendoza and Maximiliano Abad from Buenos Aires, the candidate for governor of Santa Fe Carolina Losada. The former panelist competes internally against Maxi Pullaro, another radical, but who answers to Morales-Larreta.
The Buenos Aires strategy was configured in different ways. Rodríguez Larreta chose to establish a foothold in the most populous districts and Patricia Bullrich decided to go looking for votes in the interior of Buenos Aires, which has a less dense demographic, but is a territory neglected by the PRO and with a much more radical presence. Of the 135 municipalities, Bullrich has an alliance with 33 Buenos Aires mayors while Larreta only got 19. But in terms of the number of voters, the municipalities allied with the Buenos Aires mayor are more populous. In total votes, Larreta’s 19 represent more than 1.9 million votes, while Bullrich’s reach 1.7 million. The district with the mayor allied to Larreta with the most voters is La Plata, where 600,000 people are eligible to vote, while the most powerful of Bullrich is Lanús, where 400,000 vote.
The Larreta and Bullrich lists will bear different names. The Buenos Aires mayor’s will be called El Cambio de Nuestras Vidas and will carry the letter A, while Bullrich’s will be called La Fuerza del Cambio and will go with B. In most of the country they will go with totally different lists, only in a few places such as Mendoza, Corrientes, Entre Ríos, Chubut and Chaco managed to unify them, but that responds more to the weight of local candidates than to agreements between presidential candidates.
The construction of the candidacies revolved around achieving the highest possible floor. And that floor could only be given by radicalism, which has a greater territorial presence: this is how the presence of two vice presidents of the UCR in the same inmate is explained.
