The Head of Government of the City of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodriguez Larreta, confirmed his candidacy for President with a private post on his social networks, published at 8:23 p.m. on Wednesday, alluding to the election year. How was the post? You could see a picture of kilometer 0 of route 40in the town of Cabo Vírgenes, 133 kilometers from Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz, with the following message: “It is time to encourage ourselves to transform the country forever. #Time2023”. quickly, that hashtag (which Larreta will use during his campaign in search of the presidency) was replicated by different referents of space who support his candidacy. After 15 hours of its launch, #Hora2023 had more than 17,000 mentions on Twitter and it remained within the “TOP 10” of the most talked about on that platform.
At 20:28, five minutes after its publication, “Larreta” was one of the most searched words in Google Argentina with the highest popularity index: 100. It is important to remember that, as the search engine explains, “that value indicates the maximum popularity of a term, while 50 and 0 indicate that a term is half as popular as the maximum value or that there was not enough data for the term, respectively”. The five places where this search was carried out the most were: City of Buenos Aires, Santa Cruz, San Luis, Río Negro and Jujuy.
Later, the Head of Government published a video last Thursday noon of almost two and a half minutes to confirm its launch: “I want to be a good President.” This sort of spot was recorded in the same place, Cabo Vírgenes, and up to the time of writing this note, had more than 630,000 views, almost 4,300 retweets and 248,000 reproductions on Twitter. On Instagram, the post garnered more than 10,300 likes and 2,500 comments. With that video, “Larreta” climbed to the first Twitter trend in Argentina, with more than 25,000 mentions and #Hora2023 was almost at 20,000. Another trend that climbed was # Horacio2023, also used by his current partner, Milagros Maylin, who shared a post supporting him: “I admire you so much! We deserve a good president. #HORACIO2023”. And one more detail: with the publication of the video, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta changed his profile photo to one in which he is with the Cabo Vírgenes lighthouse in the background, to which he alludes in the spot, and also the one on the cover of Facebook and Twitter for an image of kilometer 0 of RN 40.
What happened to other “possible” PRO candidates? María Eugenia Vidal shared an image on her social networks with Mauricio Macri for the former president’s visit to the new offices of the former governor in Retiro: “Thank you Mauricio for joining us today and for always trusting. I KNOW THAT YOU CAN, because I believe in our team, I believe in my country and I believe in the Argentines. We are going to recover the future”. This publication occurred eight hours before the release of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta but, beyond the time and the chosen copy, the most curious thing was a detail that was seen behind the two politicians. A sign that said “Vidal”. Until then everything seemed normal but, when zooming in on the image, the following word could be read under the last name: “president”. That is, “Vidal president.” Was it a fluke and the advisors didn’t notice? Or was everything searched?
Instead, Patricia Bullrich, he continues with his toughest stance. The same day Larreta was launched, the former Security Minister published a thread of nine tweets firing at different politicians and trade unionists: “THERE IS NO PLACE TO DIALOGUE WITH THOSE WHO ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM AND DEEPEN THE DECLINE OF OUR COUNTRY. There is no place for lukewarm answers before the sad reality that Argentines suffer”. He refers to Cristina, publishing an image of the former president: “Are we going to talk with Cristina about how to end corruption?” He used the same concept tweeting an image of Sergio Massa, the same as with Hugo Moyano, Roberto Baradel, Juan Grabois, Aníbal Fernández and even Eugenio Zaffaroni.
