Before the elections

It's only a few days to the legislative election, so this is a brief "state of the campaign" post. I'll refrain from emphasizing the appallingly low level of today's politics, if only because the post would turn into in a long, bitter rant if I tried to convey that.

First, my home district, Santa Fe. Here the senatorial race is the major one, because we have two great contenders: former two-time governor Carlos Reutemann, and Rubén Giustiniani, backed by current governor and former two-time mayor of Rosario Hermes Binner. Both candidates are already senators and both are sure to be reelected; the real issue is, first, who will win (even by one vote), and in a distant second place, which party will get the third senator.

Reutemann is a well-known, wealthy, conservative Peronist who for some reason (certainly not his charisma or his performance when in office) has consistently captured over a third of the vote in every election. Giustiniani is your typically neat low-profile militant of the very moderate (almost European-like) Socialist Party who ran (big mistake!) as candidate for the vice-presidency next to Elisa Carrió in 2007. Reutemann is playing the anti-Kirchnerist card, an attribute he earned by positioning himself against the ruling couple on the issue of Resolution 125, even though he barely did anything but raise his hand on command on all other issues. Since half the population of the province barely knows Giustiniani, until a few months ago Reutemann took his triumph for granted, but since governor Binner stepped into the campaign, Giustiniani has come close to his opponent, to the point that the predicted result is very close to a tie.

The leading candidates for the Chamber of Deputies are almost completely unknown; they're only getting votes because they'll be on the same paper ballot as their respective senators. Ironically, the only candidate everyone knows is the one heading for the distant third place: Agustín Rossi, by now politically disgraced in his own home turf due to his complete, unwavering submission to Néstor Kirchner.

In the Province of Buenos Aires, well... you have a contest of unscrupulous millionaires, a huge, impoverished clientele, well-oiled political machines with their filthy cogs obscenely in view and no-one doing anything about it, the government doing campaign for its party with state funds, the opposition wipping up the visceral hate for the Kirchners of the mostly right-wing citizenry, and no government proposals whatsoever except for "it's us or chaos". It's sleazy. So you'll forgive me if I refuse to take one more step into that crap.

Several problems with this election and with the system in general: first, the ballots printed by each party with their own candidates (instead of a universal ballot where you have to select what you want), which leaves ample space for fraud and many borderline illegal practices; second, the use of (linear) proportional representation in a country like Argentina, with a ridiculously skewered population distribution, which makes it possible for a party to win an election just by concentrating their efforts on a few hundred square kilometers crammed full with very poor, very influentiable people; third, the lack of political awareness of most of the citizens, understandably tired of anything to do with politics, which makes it easy for opportunists to flourish and for the unscrupulous to "disappear in the crowd".

I feel fortunate that I inhabit a district where, at least, the choices are clear-cut and the fight has not turned dirty beyond words. I won't vote for Reutemann, the love child of Carlos Menem and completely deprived of ideas besides his own plans to maintain influence; I won't vote for Rossi, a mouthpiece of the Executive Branch who would bring its own province to its knees to further the Kirchnerist agenda of centralized control; I'll vote for Giustiniani, who has some ideas I like and belongs to a structured political project that's going in the (general) right direction.

Wrapping up the campaign

We're in veda electoral, that is, the common pre-election ban on political advertising, since this morning. Though next Sunday's is just a primary election, it works like a main one and it's equally a bother: it's compulsory and you can't sell (therefore can't buy) booze the night before and during the whole day (you can buy booze beforehand and save it for Sunday, though).

In Rosario, almost exactly 700,000 people have the right and the obligation to vote; in Santa Fe as a whole, about 2.3 million. We're selecting the candidates who will run for their respective parties in the main election in September. Until 2005 we had Ley de Lemas, a perverse system by which a candidate could win with fewer votes than most of their opponents (follow the link). In fact, with Ley de Lemas you could win with 2 votes against someone who had gotten 1 million votes, provided you had 999,999 other candidates of your own party running beside you and they each got 1 vote (which would make a total of 1,000,001 votes for your party as a whole).

The system was repealed and replaced by simultaneous compulsory primary elections — compulsory for the parties, even if a party has internally decided to run with only one candidate. That's the case of the Socialist Hermes Binner, the favorite to win the governorship according to all surveys. The Justicialists (Peronists) have a more complicated task ahead, since they're presenting two candidates (Agustín Rossi and Rafael Bielsa) under the name Frente para la Victoria (Front for Victory), the faction of President Kirchner, plus one more, Roxana Latorre, who rebelliously decided to run by herself, and (naturally) claims to represent the true interests of Peronism. Latorre is (or was) a pawn of Carlos Reutemann, the Formula 1 race driver turned governor by the magic of Menemist popstar politics in the 1990s, and she doesn't like how the dominant faction has taken up her space.

Now common sense tells everybody that Latorre's proclamation of independence means less votes for the "official" Peronists; it doesn't matter now in the primaries, but it will matter in September, since Latorre will draw votes (very few, but some) from either Rossi or Bielsa. Binner, who runs solo and only appears as candidate in the primaries to keep the letter of the law, doesn't have this kind of problem. Socialism is allied with the Radical Civic Union, which managed to preserve a degree of local power (smaller towns scattered throughout the province) after they blew it once and again and descended into obscurity on the larger context thanks to President Alfonsín selling out to Menem (1994) and President de la Rúa selling out to Domingo Cavallo and fleeing the Casa Rosada on a helicopter (2001), not to mention other stupid blunders and many gestures of misplaced moral authority in the meantime and up to now who would've made Alem and Yrigoyen spin in their respective graves.

In Santa Fe, most of the Radicals saw the convenience of selling out once again, this time to Binner's Frente Progresista (Progressive Front), and are therefore telling their people to vote for Binner, who has placed a number of Radicals in his associated list of provincial legislators; a sensible move that will allow them to keep a foot on the parliamentary door and maybe, in a few years' time, run their own candidate for governor. Reelection is not allowed, so if Binner wins he'll be out again in merely four years.

In Rosario the mayoral candidates will be competing as well. We have two heavyweights on the side of Justicialism, Héctor Cavallero (former mayor, former Socialist and Binner's mentor, very good in his time, sold out to Menem — a pity) and Juan Héctor Sylvestre Begnis (former Radical, migrated to Peronism, son of Santa Fe's best governor of all time, served as a very fine Minister of Health of Santa Fe, also a pity since the one we have today is a living shame). There's the usual assortment of unknowns crawling around, too. On Binner's side, the current mayor Miguel Lifschitz looking for reelection — an almost sure bet, and Carlos Comi, a concejal (city council member) who belongs to the local branch of ARI. ARI, you'll remember, is the party founded by Elisa Carrió, the party that won its first governorship last Sunday in the person of Fabiana Ríos, the rosarina that moved to Tierra del Fuego. Funny!

Comi and ARI in general are not too happy with Binner, since the Socialist ballot we'll find in the voting room next Sunday carries Binner and Lifschitz on the same piece of paper, while ARI will not have such a big name attached to its candidate. If you want to vote for Binner and Comi, you'll have to cortar boleta — cut the ballot manually (or with a scissor), while if you want Binner and Lifschitz, you just need to tuck the ballot in the envelope as it is. Lifschitz thus benefits from Binner's preference..., you know, like placing the brand of potato chips you want to sell next to the beer aisle on the supermarket. So Fabiana Ríos and Elisa Carrió came to Rosario this week to support Comi's campaign, and they mounted a kiosk with a gigantic pair of scissors. Subtle.

The official Peronist candidates have been much kinder to one another, to the point of boring us all and the media. According to both of them, everything in the province is so darn well done already they only need to continue doing what the party has been doing since 1983...

Fun with the mayor

Just two pictures to show the pathetic status of Rosario's political debate regarding the administration of mayor Miguel Lifschitz.

The first one shows Lifschitz next to Arnold Schwarzenegger as a "Terminator of Cities". Lifschitz visited San Francisco and other places in California, U.S., last month, along with local officials and businessmen. He was received by the mayor of SF and the lieutenant governor of California, but he didn't actually meet Arnold. The distinctly cartoonish quality of California's chief elected official is easy to make fun of, and prompted great hilarity this side of the border, though it's really not that fun. However, this unsubtle, childish poster was paid for by a university faction of the local Peronist party.


The second picture is merely one example of the similarly-themed graffiti that have popped up in the whole city as of late. It blames Lifschitz for the two last raises in the urban bus fee, which went from AR$0.75 to 1.20 in a year. The blame is to be placed in the outrageous demands of the bus drivers (backed by a powerful union), who now have initial monthly wages equal to two or three times what a policeman or a teacher gets. In truth, Rosario had a very cheap fee compared to most cities in the country, and the bus fee has been raised in most of them as well, except Buenos Aires, after the national subsidies to diesel for public transport were redistributed.


Lifschitz has kept a low profile and a good public image for more than three years. He's running for reelection in September, and it looks like he'll win by a landslide. The Peronist party has resorted to picking on every little fault and inventing problems — for example, that Rosario is driving out manufacturing industries due to its lack of industrial policies and its preference for sissy Socialist quality-of-life-inducing green spaces and its promotion of culture and tourism. I for one would rather see more green and less industry. Anyway industrial facilities are being set up in the neighbouring towns, and they produce wealth for everyone around.

The only mature choice the Peronists have made regarding the political contest is the decission of governor pre-candidate Ángel Rossi to enroll the "K Radical" Juan Héctor Sylvestre Begnis as candidate for mayor of Rosario. Sylvestre Begnis was a fine Minister of Health of Santa Fe in the past, a supporter of proactive policies regarding sex education and contraception that are much needed here, and one who worked very well with the national Health Minister. His father was governor of Santa Fe in the 1960s, and a very good one. S. B. is surely the best mayor candidate that his party has put forward since... well, ever. For a change, he began by acknowledging that Lifschitz is doing a good job overall, which suggests he'll campaign on doing more things and doing better, rather than focusing on the negatives.

Of course I prefer Lifschitz to win. With his former mentor Hermes Binner as the governor, as the election is likely to turn out, there should be less friction between the province and the city, and Rosario might finally gain its long requested autonomic status. That might mean reforming the provincial constitution, which Binner has vowed to do, and which must be done anyway to keep it in line with the national constitution in several matters (including, precisely, the issue of autonomous municipalities).

Mayor Lifschitz goes to San Francisco

Rosario's mayor Miguel Lifschitz travelled to San Francisco, California, United States. Besides the exchange of ideas and vague promises of cooperation, San Francisco's mayor promised he'll work on making Rosario and San Francisco sister cities... whatever that means... as long as both he and Lifschitz are reelected this year (we have elections in September; San Francisco has them in November).

It turns out, also, that San Francisco's Secretary of Transport is a rosarino! Lifschitz had mentioned that he wanted to bring back the trolleybus to Rosario; there's one (the K line), operated by the municipal state-owned transport company, going east–west all across town, but that's just the last remains of a grid of electric trams that used to cover the city. The municipality wants the trolleybus to have a place in it, by restoring the M line, going north–south.

It's been years since Rosario's bus system has had increasing problems coping with a larger urban area and a larger population. Long ago the municipality planned a new system which would replace the many unconnected bus lines with a hierarchy of district-based lines, transfer lines between nearby areas of the city, and main lines that would cross the whole city. The system was discussed, debated, studied, reformed, and presented to the private companies; it failed to gather investments, then there came an economic crisis, then another, then it failed again... The last attempt succeeded, so we're waiting, sometime during 2007, for the buses to be reorganized. The trams would be an interesting addition to the mix.

The opportunity is unique. The city of Vancouver, Canada, is liquidating its fleet of old trams, which are nevertheless working fine, and it's vowed to donate them to Córdoba, Mendoza and Rosario — we're going to get 70 of them, provided we can pay for the shipping, which is minor compared to the cost of the units. We'll then need 15 million pesos to mount the infrastructure. The K line serves a lot of people and is remarkably quiet, so I hope the M line will be OK as well. What I'd like to see is a picture of Vancouver's trams (Wikimedia Commons has a picture of a TransLink trolley bus, but I doubt that's it).

Besides the tram, it seems Lifschitz liked San Francisco's touristic cable car. There was a project, once, to set up a railway along the coast of the Paraná so that passengers could watch the view. Again, it was one of those things easier said than done. With the city now decidedly going touristic and economically improving, the mayor is pondering the idea of a cable car in Rosario. That would be a major attraction. The municipality has worked hard to make the shoreline accessible and available; from the center northward you can stroll (or jog) along pedestrian paths by parks and beaches for some 7 km with almost no interruption, admiring the river and the islands in the east, and the skyline of the city in the west. A way to do the same for those not keen on walking, or to enjoy the view comfortably in the hottest times of day in the summer, or during rainy days, would be extremely welcome, and if not touristically expensive, also quite useful in itself.
Pathetic attempts at criticizing Lifschitz's administration routinely pop up in the walls of certain parts of the city. Lifschitz is a Socialist and a former official of the Binner administration, and though he's kept his low profile and a cautious distance from the campaign for the governorship, Binner and Lifschitz are linked in the popular sentiment, and the Peronist operators of Rafael Bielsa's campaign are taking advantage of that. "Lifschitz, enough with the travels, Rosario needs solutions", I read today in a wall — this, as governor Obeid is in Cuba presenting a book of his, admiring a replica of Che Guevara's home and sucking up to the Castros. Not that that's wrong in any sense; mayors and governors often travel abroad to showcase their lands and promote trade and cultural exchange. "Lifschitz = Bus fee raise", on a poster, too, with a picture of Binner on one side, explaining that the Socialists don't have a solution for the city's problems. (The Peronist leader in the city council made a public display of disapproval when the mayor was forced to raise the fee after the bus drivers got an outrageous salary raise. They also complained when the municipality rose the real estate tax to make upper-middle-class homes pay more than a few pesos. This is all useless since they can't block anything in the council — it's just for show.)

The Peronists have been unable to win in Rosario since 1983; since 1989 we've had Socialist mayors, and Lifschitz is practically sure to win this time again. The Peronist candidates over the years have all been ridiculous... low-level party cronies with a history of living off political favours, opportunists with no idea how to run a city, a foul-mouthed mediocre yellow journalist, the leader of a pharmacy chain suspected of supplying his business with stolen medicine... anyone, absolutely anyone who could bring even a single vote to the cause, under the legal fraud of the Ley de Lemas, tailor-made for the benefit of the pragmatic Justicialist Party. All of them put together, on three consecutive elections, could not come close to Binner or Lifschitz running alone. The city has terrible problems, but people aren't that stupid. So maybe next year, if mayor Newsom of San Francisco is still there, Rosario will have a new sister.

The 2007 campaign

The campaign for the governor election in Santa Fe is getting hotter... or should I say the pre-campaign, since there are formally no candidates yet, no parties or alliances already in the register that must be compiled months before the election.

Before you go away, I may as well explain why this is important. As anybody who's been living under a democracy for a while knows, elections almost never change anything — 99% of the times it's the same people or their clones trying to get you to vote for them with all sorts of empty promises, oblique threats, lies, lies, more lies, mud-slinging, sentimental pleas, appeals to your pocket or your ethics, etc., and once they're elected they resume their daily routine, some jobs and titles exchanged for others. Well, this might be one of the 1%.

The reasons:

• This is the first governor election since 1991 without the Ley de Lemas. I'll spare you the details here. The Lemas electoral system allowed Peronism to steal the election twice.
• The established Socialist candidate, Hermes Binner (twice mayor of Rosario), is leading the surveys. If he wins, he'll be the first Socialist governor in the history of Argentina.
• The established Peronist candidates are both linked to Rosario as well; one was born here (though he was exiled in Europe and then moved to Buenos Aires) and the other has lived and made its political career in Rosario since his youth.
• Given the two points above, the next governor of Santa Fe is practically sure to be a man of Rosario, ending (we hope) a long string of rulers that have consistently economically and politically discriminated against the largest and most important city in the province. This might lead to a better share of funds for Rosario, and to the attainment of a long sought after dream: municipal autonomy, à la Buenos Aires City.

Besides those specific points, a change from the Justicialist Party to the Socialist Party (well, to any other party) should revolutionize the whole provincial state. The Peronists have stayed in power since 1983. The governors and vice-governors up to 1991 were uniformly awful and utterly corrupt. In 1991 came Carlos Reutemann, a former F1 race driver sponsored by the dreaded Carlos Menem. Reutemann, a man with zero charisma, zero ability to rule, zero everything except a public figure, was a success with the masses, and one of the first examples of the modern tactic of recruiting popular characters (no matter how frivolous or dumb) to get votes. His merit, as acknowledged by the public, was that he didn't steal; others said he was a good administrator. He froze salaries and expenditure, sat down and waited as the stars moved above his head. In 1995 came Jorge Obeid, who stole the election from the Radical Party candidate Raúl Usandizaga by adding up the votes of the sold-out ex-Socialist Héctor Cavallero to his own using the Ley de Lemas. In 1999 Reutemann was re-elected. He oversaw a horrible crisis with a straight face, survived a couple of scandals, and in 2003 again he left the post to Obeid, who has since devoted his time to visiting Cuba, inaugurating unfinished public works, and appearing in pictures with President Kirchner.

All this time the province has been stumbling through history, guided by an automatic pilot. Its much-touted record fiscal surplus is more a product of automatic taxation on its immense wealth than a sign of good administration, and its progress in later years can be directly attributable to the overall recovery of Argentina, even moreso as it's powered by the export of agricultural commodities. The public sector is bloated and inefficient, the judicial branch is full of dark, corrupt judges protected by the political establishment, the ministries and secretaries are occupied by political operators without skills, policies and their application are irregular, episodical, never fixed, and oriented to the spectacular and to the populist.

Is that different from any other provincial administration in Argentina, or from other local and national governments in the Third World? Probably not. Can it be easily improved? Undoubtedly yes. Will it improve if the party in power changes? Probably, judging by the results that the Socialist administrations have produced in Rosario since 1989, and especially since the degradation brought about by almost a quarter of a century of Peronist rule is due mostly to stagnation and to the naturalization of bad habits.

The two main Peronist candidates are now at each other's throats, as usual; it's not that they have ideological disagreements or fight over policies (what?), but they want power and they can't both have it. Binner watches from afar and has but completely forced the hardliners of the Radical Civic Union, his allies, to choose the vice-governor candidate that he likes, the extra-party Santa Fe federal prosecutor Griselda Tessio. Isn't that nice?