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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 June 2000 Issue No. 484 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 June 2000 Issue No. 484
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Heritage Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A little to the left
By Hisham El-NaggarIt was heralded as the election of the year -- and it hardly lacked drama: passionate speeches, exchanges of insults and accusations, a cliff-hanger of a result, a possible second round and a melodramatic denouement. You'd think it was more than just a municipal election. But then, of course, the municipality in question is the autonomous city of Buenos Aires.
With a population of three million, the city is one of the most important electoral districts in the country. Surprisingly, its experience in self-government is rather limited; this is only the second election in which porteños (the inhabitants of Buenos Aires) directly elected their mayor. A constitutional amendment enacted in 1994 ended the presidential appointment of mayors and much of the municipal administration -- a practice that had made the municipal government unaccountable to the electorate.
Buenos Aires' first mayoral election in 1994 saw the victory of the Radical Party's Fernando de la Rua. During his tenure, de la Rua streamlined the administration and improved services without increasing municipal taxes. De la Rua also took on a new title -- "head of government of the city" -- declaring himself equal to provincial governors. The provinces, ever-jealous of haughty Buenos Aires, snubbed their noses at him, but he went on to become a star of the centre-left coalition known as "Alianza," cultivating an image of a corruption-free force trying to set itself apart from the Peronist government of former President Carlos Menem.
De la Rua's record proved impressive enough to those both inside and outside of Buenos Aires; last year he was catapulted into the Casa Rosada, Argentina's presidential palace, following a landslide election victory. This most recent municipal election can be viewed as an early electoral test of voters' attitudes toward de la Rua's policies. And, if truth be told, there has been a lot to be tested. In the five months since he assumed the presidential mantle, de la Rua has been implementing the IMF-proposed policy that made his predecessor Menem so unpopular, complete with severe budget cuts and a "labour flexibilisation" law.
De la Rua's success can in large part be attributed to the image he has taken pains to project. In sharp contrast with the flamboyance and occasional contempt for institutional propriety demonstrated by Menem, de la Rua has presented himself as humble and thoroughly committed to following procedures. That seems to have done the trick; the porteños, at any rate, voted in large numbers for the Alianza's mayoral candidate, Anibal Ibarra. The city's constitution specified that the winner needs 50 per cent of all votes, failing which a second round should be held between the two highest-scoring candidates. Ibarra scored a tantalising 49.42 per cent against his opponent, who was none other than Domingo Cavallo, former minister of economy under Menem and the architect of the monetary reform plan, which wiped out inflation.
Cavallo had succeeded in avoiding some of the stigma of having been Menem's minister by resigning his post at a not-too-advanced stage and trying to reinvent himself as a hero of the orthodox right. But there was a small drawback: Cavallo's crowning achievement, the taming of inflation, was achieved at the cost of a huge increase in the unemployment rate and a decline (estimated at 20 per cent) in real wages. Added to this, many of those suffering from his policies resided in the very electoral district which he had hoped to conquer.
For a while, his campaign seemed to be faring well. He had many friends in the establishment, and he sought to consolidate his standing with the lower end of the electorate by flirting with the Peronist Party, which traditionally has a large following among the city's less well-off inhabitants.
The Peronists, meanwhile, were lying low, their standing in the city -- though perhaps not in the country -- was at a low ebb following the disastrous last years of Menem's tenure. Menem had shifted the party so decisively to the right that it lost much of its appeal to the poor.
Cavallo was trying to play the trick that right-wing politicians throughout the world have tried to play: he attempted to capitalise on a close association with the economic establishment while at the same time trying to appeal to less prosperous voters on issues where the right has traditionally been strong, namely, security and family values.
Given the competition, such a strategy appeared quite viable. Facing Cavallo was a young, relatively inexperienced member of the decidedly left-wing part of Alianza -- "a communist," said Cavallo's more rabid supporters; "a hopeless amateur," Cavallo himself declared with a stiff upper lip.
Well, Buenos Aires thought otherwise. Cavallo was not helped by his own authoritarian, self-congratulatory style, nor by the whispers about his past. In spite of his efforts to distance himself from recent authoritarian governments, Cavallo's exertions proved futile given his extensive record of holding posts in many of these governments since the late 1960s.
When the votes were finally counted in the wee hours of 8 May, Ibarra was found to have scored 49.42 per cent to Cavallo's 33.08 per cent. A landslide victory, if ever there was one, although strictly speaking, the constitution says 50 per cent is needed to avoid a second round. Cavallo thundered before TV cameras that he had been the victim of fraud, labelled his opponent as "impotent" and a "lackey" and swore he would fight it out with him in a second round.
But wiser counsel prevailed. Cavallo changed his mind the next day, grudgingly congratulating the man he had insulted and bowed out as gracefully as he could.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the election is the message it sends to de la Rua in the Casa Rosada. While Ibarra won nearly one-half of all votes, Alianza's city council candidates scored a much less impressive 36.81 per cent. But porteños, who did not vote for the centre-left Alianza did not look to the right to cast their city council votes for Cavallo's cronies. Rather these voters looked to the left. As a result, Buenos Aires' city council will soon boast a communist, a Trotskyite and an ecologist, among other left-leaning counsellors who until recently would have been considered unelectable.
Indeed, this was the best election the left (as opposed to centre-left) has ever had in this country. Its electoral showing is perhaps not strong enough to influence policy directly, but is certainly enough to act as a force to be reckoned with on a city council where the Alianza will have a plurality, but not the majority of seats. What some voters seemed to have been saying was that it is time to pay less attention to the IMF's pronouncements and more to the sorry state to which these policies have reduced a good portion of the population.
Nonetheless, the overwhelming feeling among Alianza politicians is one of unbounded joy. Buenos Aires, the "Paris of the South" (as porteños like to call it) has remained faithful to the centre-left coalition that rules the nation -- for the time being, at any rate.
