Argentines vote for a new president

Argentines will be weighing continuity versus a financial overhaul Sunday October 25, 2015 as they pick the successor to President Cristina Fernandez, a polarizing leader who dominated national politics for 12 years.

Argentine newspaper headlines in Monday read, “Sea Change”, “Macri’s great election thwacked the ruling party”, “Surprise and a virtual tie between Macri and Scioli”.

The result means Mr Scioli, governor of Buenos Aires province and a former world powerboat champion, will have to enter a run-off with Mr Macri on 22 November.

The leading opposition candidate promised changes with a few continuity. Polls show him hovering near the 40 percent threshold and Macri approaching 30 percent.

But exit polls gave second place to his conservative rival, the favorite of the business community, Mauricio Macri.

He presided over average economic growth of more than eight percent a year, before handing power to his wife in 2007.

Political analyst Rosendo Fraga said “the big victor is the candidate who came in second”.

Ms Fernandez said achieving stability and leaving Argentines “a normal country” was the promise made by her late husband, Neston Kirchner, when he took office in 2003.

The 58-year-old powerboating fanatic – who lost his right arm in a 1989 racing accident – served as Nestor Kirchner’s vice president. “The core tenets will be much closer to what Macri is proposing than Scioli”.

The Kirchner family did however rack up victories in its southern stronghold of Santa Cruz, where the president’s son Maximo, 38, was elected to Congress and her sister-in-law Alicia, 69, won the governorship.

“Nevertheless, there are hundreds of billions of dollars of savings of wealthy Argentines outside of Argentina, ready to invest in their beloved country”, he said.

Numerous polls in recent months had projected that ruling party candidate Daniel Scioli would win by 10 percent or more.

Buenos Aires province is home to 38 percent of the electorate, with sections that are traditional hotspots of support for Peronism, largely the poor neighborhoods surrounding the capital.

Dissident Peronist Sergio Massa received 21.34 percent of the vote; Nicolas del Caño, of the Frente de Izquierda, got 3.27 percent; Progressive Margarita Stolbizer garnered 2.54 percent; and former President Adolfo Rodriguez Saa, of Compromiso Federal, received 1.67 percent of the vote.

Massa, a former Kirchner ally who fell out with the president and launched a rival party, the Renewal Front, two years ago, could also have a serious impact on the election.

“In the past, we’ve always voted in the middle of crisis”, said Kirchner, who leaves office with an approval rating of around 50 percent after serving the two-term limit.

He will be painted, in these interceding weeks, as a charlatan who wants to slash government spending and abandon the expensive welfare programmes that are so popular with many of Argentina’s Peronist-supporting working classes.

Macri, the Buenos Aires mayor, presented himself as the candidate to put Argentina’s economy in order, promising to make a deal with the US creditors and lift unpopular currency restrictions.