Monday, April 20, 2015
UCR wins in Mendoza primaries
Radical candidate Cornejo casts his ballot yesterday in Mendoza.
Cornejo comes on top as combined Peronist contenders appear to come a close second
The Radical (UCR) party won in Mendoza's PASO primary elections yesterday, which gave Alfredo Cornejo the front seat for the June provincial elections.
With 86.41 percent of the votes counted, the radical candidate Alfredo Cornejo reached 44.92 percent of the votes against the three candidates of the Victory Front who obtained 40.35 percent together. Noelia Barbeito from FIT was in the third place with 6.94 percent of the votes.
Although Cornejo's candidacy for the Cambia Mendoza (CM) front was backed by a wide array of opposition parties, including Mauricio Macri’s PRO, Sergio Massa’s Renewal Front (FR), Mendoza’s Democrat Party (PD), the Socialist (PS) Party and the Civic Coalition (CC-ARI), among others, neither Macri nor Massa travelled to Mendoza to celebrate their victory, allowing the UCR to take centre stage.
Governor Francisco “Paco” Pérez’s Victory Front (FPV) finished second, but still had reasons to put a positive spin on results as, when added together, their three candidates are a few points away from Bermejo’s vote tally. The Peronist vote was led by the incumbent governor’s favourite Adolfo Bermejo, with 24.80 percent of the votes.
Still, Cornejo’s victory gives him an edge to reclaim the local government house in the provincial elections, as differences inside the FpV could mean that not all the ballots cast for Peronists Guillermo Carmona and Matías Roby in the primaries will automatically translate into votes for Bermejo in the general election.
Yesterday’s scrutiny was slow and with lots of complications, with several citizen polling officers absent (see below) and districts such as Guaymallén and Luján suffering from a slow vote count due to the large number of ballots available inside voting booths.
Claiming victory
“We hope that those who are part of the government accept this strong defeat, and that change is coming to Mendoza. We are willing to talk with the current authorities about the changes that Mendoza needs now, because Mendoza can’t wait until December 10,” Cornejo said in a post-election news conference. “We want to improve our vote tally for the June elections.”
Cornejo then thanked “all citizens that supported change,” calling for “a well-administered Mendoza that can improve economically and provide good policing, education and health.”
His speech was focused on economic problems and what he described as poor state services.
Cornejo stressed his ticket was expected to be 20 points above Bermejo’s.
Since the return of democracy in 1983, the province has been ruled by Radicals during most of the Raúl Alfonsín administration, by Peronists during Carlos Menem’s tenure and Radicals again since 1999. The nationwide dominance of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner during the 2007 and 2011 elections meant that her Peronist allies took back the province by a small margin in the last two terms, but Radicals are now determined to recoup one of their historical strongholds.
A victory in the province is of big symbolic meaning for the UCR, as Ernesto Sanz and Julio Cobos, arguably the party’s two biggest national figures, are Mendoza natives. Laura Montero, a close Cobos ally, runs as Cornejo’s lieutenant-governor candidate.
From Rosario, Macri congratulated Cornejo for his win, saying the Radicals were a fundamental part of the PRO coalition running to win the presidential race.
With 4.3 percent of Argentina’s voters, Mendoza has 1.35 million ballots to distribute among presidential candidates in October elections.
With the race for first place divided between FpV and a wide alliance of national opposition parties, the Workers’ Leftist Front (FIT) had no strong rivals for third place, confirming its relative strength in Mendoza by taking eight percent of the votes at press time.
The front’s performance was not as significant as that of 2013’s midterms, when it took an impressive 14 percent of the ballots, but the party still has room for improvement, as in that year the party doubled its vote tally in the provincial elections when compared to the primaries.
Another reason for optimism inside FIT’s camp is that the also leftist MST will not be a rival in June, as they did not reach the minimum numer of votes to pass the primary yesterday.
Peronist struggle
Bermejo’s second place can be seen as confirming the dominance of Peronist governors over Fernández de Kirchner inside the local FpV.
His candidacy received the blessing of presidential hopeful Daniel Scioli, as well as that of Pérez and Carlos Ciurca, Mendoza’s two top authorities, after CFK clashed with Pérez over the lack of La Cámpora lawmakers in Bermejo’s ticket.
That conflict ended with the president sacking old-guard Peronist middleman Juan Carlos Mazzón — who was usually in charge of negotiating available positions in each Peronist ticket — from her team, and with the Pink House’s public endorsement of Guillermo Carmona, who at press time was only receiving 10.75 percent of the votes with 25.04 percent of polling stations reporting.
According to FpV’s presidential hopeful Florencio Randazzo, usually critical of Scioli, the Carmona-Naman formula was the one which “best represents the national (political) project” led by the president.
FpV’s third candidate, Matías Roby, was backed by five percent of the electorate.
Roby stepped down as Health minister of the Pérez administration in February, as he was seen representing the anti-government splinter of the CGT umbrella union led by Hugo Moyano. It is not clear if the ballots cast for Carmona and Roby in the primaries will automatically translate into votes for Bermejo in the general election as Roby said yesterday that he would support the Peronist winner, but that there was “no chance” of a “unity picture” between the three Peronist candidates after the primaries, raising suspicions about his closeness to Moyano and Macri’s PRO.
“We know that the combined votes (of all) Victory Front (candidates) are not all votes that belong to the FpV,” Cornejo said, before thanking Roby for being the only person that called him to congratulate him for his victory.
Yesterday’s primaries also decided the candidacies in most of Mendoza’s districts, with the exception of the capital city and San Carlos, where separate elections were held in February.
— Herald staff
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