Peronists in uphill battle to hang on to Argentine presidency

By Hildegard Stausberg

BERLIN (DPA): Argentina looks set for a change at the top, with voters going to the polls on Sunday amid strong indications that the party of President Carlos Menem is about to lose its lease on the presidential palace.

Menem, president since 1989, cannot run for another term. And the polls show candidate Eduardo Duhalde, who is aligned with Menem's rightist Partido Justicialista (Peronist) party, well behind Fernando de la Rua of the left-of-center Alianza.

Indeed, some polls put de la Rua as much as 10 percentage points ahead of his opponent, but it is a three-way race and if de la Rua fails to get 50 percent he will be forced into a run- off election, most likely with Duhalde.

De la Rua's Alianza is, as its name implies, an alliance of parties, the most important of which is the candidate's Union Civica Radical (UCR).

The UCR, founded at the turn of the century and the traditional vehicle of the country's later European immigrants, likes to think of itself as the defender of true democracy in Argentina.

On several occasions UCR presidents have been ousted from power by the military -- coups which, awkwardly, have had fairly widespread public support, because UCR leaders have often suffered from a certain economic incompetence.

Traditionally on bad terms with business, they have encouraged excessive bureaucratization and have showered favors on friends of the party.

But de la Rua, 62, has successfully dodged opponents' efforts to tarnish him with his party's decidedly mixed record. He has repeatedly insisted that he will continue the free-market economic policies introduced by Menem in the early 1990s, and promised to maintain the fixed link between the peso and the dollar established under the outgoing president.

It was these measures, devised by Menem's former finance minister, Domingo Cavallo, which are widely credited for finally taming the inflation which had raged in Argentina since the 1950s, nearly wiping out the once-substantial middle class.

A strong peso, however, has made Argentinean exports less competitive in the last few years, especially since the economic crisis and resulting currency devaluation in Brazil, the country's major trading partner.

De la Rua's opponents' main difficulty, however, is the good name he has made for himself over the last three years as the first elected mayor of Buenos Aires. The metropolis, with a population of 12 million, has an immense influence across the country of 36 million people.

That most famous of all tango singers, Carlos Gardel, once described Buenos Aires as "the Queen on the Rio Plata," but it has since become one of the most dangerous of all Latin American capitals. What may help de la Rua, however, is that most Argentineans appear to assign most of the blame for rising crime and horrendous corruption to the Peronists.

Menem, who is constitutionally prohibited from serving another term, leaves office 10 years after inheriting an extremely difficult political and economic situation from a UCR president, Raul Alfonsin.

In 1989 Argentina was in disastrous economic shape, a failure in foreign policy terms and bitterly divided politically as it tried to come to terms with the legacy of the military dictatorship, which had finally collapsed only several years earlier.

But Menem managed to begin an impressive economic turnaround for the country during his first term. Working with Alfonsin, he also pushed through a series of important constitutional measures -- including one which allowed him to run for a second term.

But he is not leaving office in much glory. Menem has managed to maintain currency stability, but he long ago fell out with Cavallo and the country is sliding into an ever deeper recession. Unemployment is rising, increasing tensions among Peronists, who have also grown increasingly critical of what they see as Menem's arbitrary leadership style.

There is also considerable resentment that Menem has lent relatively little support to the Duhalde campaign. Keeping his distance from the Peronist candidate, Menem has let it be known that he is considering another run for the presidency in 2003.

"Only I can govern Argentina," the 64-year-old Menem is not shy about proclaiming -- publicly and often.

That claim can be debated, of course, but there is no denying that Menem has been very successful in emulating the strategy of his political model, the late president Juan Domingo Peron. Like the legendary Peron, Menem has mastered the art of "packaging" serious policies in a populist way and "selling" them to the poor masses of Argentineans.

The more remote Duhalde has not proved a very adept student of this political manipulation, and has also been tainted by accusations of corruption. Menem, in contrast, has mostly managed to stay out of the direct line of such allegations (at least around election time).

Still, it has become obvious that Menem family members are involved in such extremely dubious enterprises, which is one reason so many millions of Argentineans are eager for a cambio (change).

De la Rua has attempted to exploit this longing, repeating at every stop the same political message, that "Argentina needs one thing above all: an honest government and a clean administration."

A similar line is adopted by Graciela Fernandez Meijide, the Alliance's candidate for governor of Buenos Aires province.

General Julio Roca, who in the 1880s more than doubled the area of Argentina with his "desert campaign," was fond of saying something which no Argentinean politician since has forgotten: "Whoever governs Buenos Aires province governs Argentina."

But the province is the traditional fortress of Peronism, in no small part because of the work of an elderly trade union leader, Carlos Ruckauf, who served as labour minister in the government of "Isabelita" Peron in the mid-1970s.

Ruckauf disdains Meijide's ceaseless calls for a far-reaching moral renewal in Argentina, and has instead been trying to mobilize the millions of politically disenfranchised people in the slums ringing Buenos Aires to fight for a political agenda which addresses their real problems.

Above all, that means more jobs. Unemployment of above 20 percent in some areas, according to Ruckauf, is the reason that violent crime has become so widespread that even police officers fear to enter certain districts.

The author of Menem's economic reforms, meanwhile, is very much a player again: Domingo Cavallo is trying to coax Argentineans into voting for a third option -- himself, as the candidate of his own party, Action for the Republic. He is aiming his pitch at middle-class people who have never supported the UCR, but are unimpressed with Duhalde.

Cavallo is given no chance of surviving the first round of voting. But if there is a second round, he may yet play kingmaker.