Shifting Alliances: Party Politics in Argentina

President Menem and his Peronist party have ruled Argentina
unchallenged for nearly a decade. An electoral alliance
that formed last year-and defeated the Peronists in legislative
elections-has set its sights on the presidency in 1999.
Argentina in the late 1980s was devastated by
hyperinflation and a political crisis linked to a
series of military uprisings against the constitu-
tional regime. While the government of Radl Alfonsin, of the Radical Civic Union Party (UCR), held out great
VOL XXXI, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1998
RaOl Alfonsin hands over the presidency to Carlos Menem at the Casa Rosada on July 8, 1989, six months ahead of schedule.
hope in the early 1980s as the country was emerging
from seven dark years of military rule, it had collapsed
by 1989 to the point that Alfonsin handed power over
to President-elect Carlos Menem, of the Peronist Party
(PJ), six months ahead of schedule.
The UCR and the PJ, the country’s traditional parties,
seemed to enjoy widespread support during the transi-
tion elections of 1983. Both parties successfully
recruited new members, and participation in internal
elections and campaign rallies was high. But the impact
11
a a
Marcos Novaro is a researcher at the Gino Germani Institute.
He is co-author with Vicente Palermo, of Polftica y Poder en el
Gobierno de Menem (Flacso/Norma, 1996) and Caminos de la
centroizquierda: Dilemas y desafios del FREPASO (Losada, 1998)
Translated from the Spanish by Margot Olavarria.REPORT ON ARGENTINA
Over the years, Menem’s decidedly non-Peronist social and
economic policies have undermined the loyalty of the party’s
traditional constituency. As a result, traditional Peronists
began to look elsewhere when it came time to vote.
of the country’s economic and political crisis under-
mined voter loyalties. While 84% of Argentines polled
in 1984 said they approved of political parties, by 1988
that number had dropped to 63% and then to 15% in the
early 1990s.1 Voluntary membership and local-level
party organizations also suffered a significant decline
after the mid-1980s. By the early 1990s, two-thirds of
Argentine citizens identified themselves as indepen-
dents.2
Carlos Menem ably took advantage of this situation
when he assumed the presidency in 1989. With the
UCR discredited after the collapse of the Alfonsin gov-
ernment, and with the Peronist party in a deep internal
crisis-racked by disputes between the reformist and
orthodox factions and between trade-union and local
leaders of the party-both parties willingly delegated
broad powers to Menem at the beginning of his term. In
fact, between 1989 and 1991, Menem governed without
input from his party or from Congress, implementing
an aggressive program of pro-market reforms by
decree-reforms that fundamentally challenged the
basic tenets of Peronism and the developmentalist state
it had helped create.
Menem’s reforms exacerbated the internal crisis of
the PJ. The deep divisions within the Peronist leadership
made it impossible for those in the party who opposed
neoliberalism to mount an effective challenge to
Menem’s policies. Another faction within the party sup-
ported the Menem government in exchange for certain
favors, including numerous shady “business deals”
which benefited legislators and provincial governors as
well as some trade unions. 3
It was Menem’s ability to turn these divisions within
the PJ to his advantage that secured his hold on power
after 1991 and permitted him to sustain the neoliberal
course he had embarked upon. In effect, Menem turned
the institutional crisis of the Peronist party into an
opportunity to redefine and strengthen its organization,
identity and program. The PJ was reorganized com-
pletely, from the highest positions to each one of its
local chapters. Today it is akin to the Mexican
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), a “state” party,
commanded-and financed-from the heights of
power and used as a political instrument of govern-
ment. 4 This does not mean the party is irrelevant. On
the contrary, in the hands of the President, the party is
fundamental to guaranteeing the success or at least the
viability of the government’s policies. This restructur-
ing of Peronismo was crucial to the legislative victories
of the PJ in 1991 and 1993 and to Menem’s reelection
in 1995. These victories reinforced Menem’s control
over the party apparatus by assuring the loyalty of party
officials who had ridden Menem’s coattails to public
office and to bureaucratic positions of power.
In sum, Menem has not tried to marginalize and
weaken the PJ, as some have argued, but rather, he has
progressively incorporated it into the government itself.
This has allowed him to use the party not only as an
instrument of control from above, but also as a means
of connecting the party’s grassroots constituency to the
government by channeling social demands and regulat-
ing public policy. The PJ has thus played a decisive role
in articulating a heterogeneous electoral coalition in
support of the Menem Administration. This coalition
brings together business and middle-class sectors who
favor pro-market reforms, on the one hand, and more
traditional supporters, linked to old-style Peronist
clientelism and populism in the provinces and in the
poor neighborhoods of the large cities, on the other. 5
As a result of this reconversion of Peronism,
party leaders have greater difficulty communi-
cating with the grassroots. Moreover, Menem’s
decidedly non-Peronist social and economic policies
began to undermine the loyalty of the PJ’s traditional
electoral constituency. As a result, traditional Peronist
voters began to look elsewhere when it came time to
vote. This, in turn, gave rise to a new opposition force,
the National Solidarity Front (FREPASO), a center-left
coalition established in 1994. From the outset,
FREPASO was a harsh critic of Menem’s relentless
neoliberalism and consistently challenged him to
respond to the growing problems of unemployment and
poverty. Paradoxically, then, neoliberal structural
reforms and the transformation of Peronism brought
about by Menem and his cronies created the conditions
for the emergence of a progressive movement in
Argentina.
NACILA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 12REPORT ON ARGENTINA
Children eat
lunch at a Peronist-
sponsored
soup kitchen in Moreno, a shantytown 20 miles from downtown Buenos Aires.
Argentina’s other traditional party, the Radicals, was
facing serious internal problems of its own-a situation
which also favored the emergence of FREPASO. The
UCR, besieged by crisis after the collapse of the
Alfonsin Administration, had difficulties adopting a
unified and consistent position against Menem. 6 In
effect, Menem had coopted the economic program that
Alfonsin and the Radical presidential candidate in
1989, Eduardo Angeloz, had been advocating. The pro-
Alfonsin faction of the UCR thus had little credibility
when it criticized the growing concentration of wealth
and the corruption increasingly evident in the Menem
government. The pro-Angeloz sector of the UCR,
meanwhile, openly backed Menem’s policies. This
division within the UCR, coupled with the party’s
defeat in the 1991 and 1993 legislative elections,
prompted Radical governors in C6rdoba, Catamarca,
Chubut and Rio Negro as well as hundreds of UCR
mayors throughout the country to distance themselves
from the party’s national leadership. They preferred to
limit themselves to local politics and avoid national
problems in order to rebuild local-level support for the
UCR in their districts, and, at the same time, to avoid
antagonizing the central government, which retained
control of the purse strings for local government.
This situation came to a head in 1993, when several
Radical governors publicly expressed their support for
the official proposal to reform the Constitution in order
to allow Menem to run for reelection in 1995. The risk
of an irreversible rupture within the UCR was one of
VOL XXXI, No 6 MAY/JuNE 1998
the motives behind Alfonsfn’s decision to sign the
reelection agreement, known as the Olivos Pact. That
decision precipitated a more dramatic electoral loss for
the Radicals, marked by a flight of votes and leaders to
FREPASO.
These problems did not, however, cause the complete
disintegration of the UCR. It retained four governor-
ships in the 1995 elections, in addition to the province
of Chaco, which it governed in alliance with
FREPASO. By the end of 1995, the Radical Party had
renovated its national leadership and recovered its
unity-a key element to the UCR victory in the munic-
ipal elections of 1996, when it won the city government
of Buenos Aires. The partial recomposition of the UCR
was crucial in allowing the party to redefine its strategy
and seal an alliance with FREPASO in 1997.
FREPASO was unquestionably the most dynamic
opposition force of this period. It was the result of the
convergence of dissident groups from the PJ and the
UCR with Socialist Unity and other smaller groups
from the left and center-left, including the Christian
Democrats, the Intransigent Party and the Communist
Party. A wide gamut of social activists and leaders were
also crucial to the founding of FREPASO. In marked
contrast to the country’s traditional parties, the group’s
organizational and territorial presence is minimal. Its
success is based essentially on the prestige of a handful
of leaders who are dynamic and effective communica-
tors-primarily congressional leaders Carlos “Chaco”
Alvarez, a former Peronist who abandoned the PJ in
13
CREPORT ON ARGENTINA
FREPASO and the Radicals knew that if the Peronists won the
1997 legislative elections, it would be impossible to defeat
them in the presidential elections two years later. Together,
they formed the Alliance for Jobs, Justice and Education, and
swept the 1997 vote.
1990 due to his opposition to Menem’s neoliberal poli-
cies, and Graciela Ferndndez Mejide, a former school-
teacher who became a prominent human rights activist
after one of her children was disappeared by the mili-
tary dictatorship.
FREPASO saw its first electoral success in the April
1994 Constitutional Assembly. With voters upset over
the signing of the Olivos Pact, the FREPASO list won in
Buenos Aires and the province of Neuqu6n. In the pres-
idential elections the following year, FREPASO won
nearly 30% of the vote, displacing the Radicals as
Argentina’s second-largest political force. Key to
FREPASO’s electoral success in both election cam-
paigns was the fact that the mass media and a broad sec-
tor of independent public opinion were increasingly
receptive to the group’s center-left discourse, which crit-
icized corruption and the government’s abuse of author-
ity, the concentration of wealth, and the dramatic rise in
poverty under Menem’s watch. In effect, FREPASO was
able to take advantage of a growing popular demand for
a progressive, nationalist opposition at a time when the
UCR appeared to have abandoned this role.
The presence of FREPASO has had a notable impact
on Argentine politics. First, it prompted the traditional
parties, and especially the Radicals, to renew their party
leadership and to revise their policies and strategies.
Second, its emergence as a third force effectively
opened the door for the formation of governing coali-
tions and for a more open game of competition and col-
laboration between political parties than was ever possi-
ble under the previous bipartisan system. Finally,
FREPASO has stimulated public debate and prompted a
flurry of legislative activity. The formation in 1997 of
the Alliance for Jobs, Education and Justice-a coalition
of FREPASO and the UCR-consolidated these
changes, producing a fundamental shift in Argentine
politics.
As early as 1995, FREPASO and the UCR began
to entertain the possibility of forming an
alliance with a view to the July 1999 presiden-
tial elections. Aware of the difficulty of confronting
Peronism divided, the two parties began to negotiate a
series of concrete agreements. In Congress, for exam-
ple, they agreed that the special powers to legislate
demanded by the President had to be curtailed, and they
declared their opposition to both the structural-adjust-
ment policies implemented in mid-1996 and to the 1997
budget. To address the pressing problem of unemploy-
ment, the UCR and FREPASO called for a special ses-
sion of Congress that resulted in the formation of a per-
manent joint committee.
There was also collaboration at other levels. In early
1996, Carlos Alvarez of FREPASO and Rodolfo
Terragno, president of the UCR, organized a Multi-
sector Forum, an assembly of party, social, union and
business organizations that planned a series of creative
protests against government policies. Some of these
protests, including the blackout of September 12, 1996
and the cacerolazo, or pot-banging, against the hike in
telephone rates on February 10, 1997, had far-reaching
repercussions in terms of mobilizing public opinion in
favor of FREPASO and the UCR. The success of the
blackout in particular marks a point of rupture in the
political scenario. Not only did it reveal the growing
consensus among the opposition-even on the issue of
economic policy, which until then had been the govern-
ment’s strong suit-but it also convinced the Radicals
and the Frentistas, as members of FREPASO are called,
of the benefits of an alliance between the two groups.
They had enough foresight to see that if the Peronists
were successful in the 1997 parliamentary elections, it
would be difficult if not impossible to defeat them in
the presidential elections two years later.
Formally established in August 1997, just two months
before the legislative elections, the Alliance openly
announced that its intention was to redraw the political
map in Argentina, beginning with the 1997 elections, as
part of a larger process of building a new majority and a
new government in 1999. Its first steps were to criticize
the concentration of power in the hands of the Executive
during the Menem Administration and to reaffirm the
importance of Congress in consolidating a democratic
political system based on checks and balances. The
Alliance then developed a series of themes that would
guide the 1997 campaign and shape the future legisla-
tive agenda, which included the creation of the Council
of the Magistracy, charged with appointing judges and
NAC1IA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 14REPORT ON ARGENTINA
Graciela Fernandez Meijide,
a congressional leader for
the Alliance for Jobs, Justice
and Education, is a leading
contender for the 1999
presidential elections.
overseeing their conduct, the
Public Ministry and an investiga-
tive committee on corruption.
Also among the Alliance’s leg-
islative priorities are limiting the
powers delegated to the
President, approving laws on
public ethics and the financing of
political parties, and eliminating
reserve funds, which consist of
budgeted funds that are con-
trolled by the President, who is
not required to report how they
are spent. The Alliance has also sought to establish a
job-creation program, to promote small and medium
businesses and the development of regional economies,
to obtain funding to increase the abysmally low salaries
of schoolteachers, and to reduce taxes on basic food
items.
While the Menem Administration had proven adept
at keeping such issues out of the campaign agenda on
previous occasions, it was unable to do so in the 1997
legislative elections, which were swept by the Alliance.
This was partly due to the fact that Fernindez Meijide, the Alliance candidate for the province of Buenos
Aires, proved to be an adept and persuasive advocate.
Ferndndez Meijide is well known for her ability to
translate institutional debates into practical issues, and
for championing human rights, justice and social inte-
gration. She is perceived as an honest leader who is
effective and reasonable, and she combines a spirit of
opposition with a vocation for public service that the
Alliance seeks to project. The conservative populist
discourse of Eduardo Duhalde, the Peronist governor of
Buenos Aires and Menem’s likely successor as presi-
dential candidate, stands in marked contrast to that of
Alliance leaders like Fernmndez Meijide.
The Alliance swept the elections at the national level,
with 45.6% of the vote, compared to 36.2% for the PJ.
The Alliance won 61 seats in the lower house, effec-
tively breaking the Peronist majority in the Chamber of
Deputies. But perhaps the most significant and surpris-
ing result of the election was the Alliance victory in
Buenos Aires-long considered a bastion of
Peronism-where it won 48.3%
of the vote, compared to the PJ’s
41.3%. The electoral results have
been devastating for the PJ.
Duhalde’s status as the Peronists’
“natural candidate” in the 1999
presidential elections is now up
for grabs-giving Menem a
chance to redouble his attempt to
change the Constitution yet again
in order to run for a third consec-
utive term as president.
Given Menem’s apparent deter-
mination to remain in the Casa Rosada, the 1999 elec-
tions represent an important test for Argentine democ-
racy-the first peaceful transfer of power from a
Peronist to a president of another political party. While
the alternation of power from a Radical president to a
Peronist in 1989 was an important step towards the con-
solidation of democracy-particularly since it repre-
sented the first peaceful transfer of power in Argentina
this century-the problem of succession remains at
least partly unresolved. The upheavals of the late
1980s-hyperinflation and the crisis of governability-
which led to the early transfer of power to Menem were
partly the result of the uncertainty generated by the
imminent change in presidential leadership.
It remains to be seen whether the PJ will accept the
electoral defeat of an incumbent Peronist president and
step down from power peacefully. This is especially
problematic given the restructuring of the Peronist
party under Menem and the fact that the PJ remains
united and active primarily due to its intimate links to
the state. In this sense, handing over power to another
party may be perceived by some Peronist leaders as a
threat to the party’s very existence. Will this lead the PJ
to seek to retain power at all costs, even the demise of
constitutional rule in Argentina? The fact that Peronism
has already played the role of an opposition party dur-
ing the Alfonsfn government offers some hope that if
the PJ loses the elections, it will peacefully hand over
power to its elected successor. Only then will Argentina
have passed this crucial test for the consolidation of
democracy.
Shifting Alliances: Party Politics in Argentina 1 .James W. McGuire, “Political Parties and Democracy in Argentina,” in Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully, eds., Building Democratic Institutions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 200-246. 2. Edgardo Catterberg, Los argentinos frente a la politica. Cultura politica y opinion pOblica en la transicifn argentina a la democra- cia (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1989). 3.On the behavior of unionists, see Victoria Murillo, “Union Responses to Economic Reform in Argentina: Organizational Autonomy and the Marketization of Corporatism,” 1994, Mimeo- graph. On governors, see Edward Gibson and Ernesto Calvo, “Electoral Coalitions and Market Reforms: Evidence from Argen- tina,” 1997, Mimeograph; and Vicente Palermo and Marcos Novaro, Politica y poder en el gobierno de Menem (Buenos Aires: Norma, 1996). On the relationship between the Executive and the party in Congress, see Sebastian Etcheruendy and Vicente Palermo, “Conflicto y concertaci6n. Gobierno, Congreso y organizaciones de interns en America Latina,” in Desarrollo Econdmico, No. 133 (1998). 4. Steven Levitsky, “Crisis, Party Adaptation, and Regime Stability in Argentina: The Case of Peronism, 1989-1995,” 1997, Mimeograph. 5. Edward Gibson and Ernesto Calvo, “Electoral Coalitions and
Market Reforms”; and Steven Levitsky, “Crisis, Party Adaptation, and Regime Stability in Argentina.” 6. Vicente Palermo and Marcos Novaro, Politica y poder en el gob- ierno de Menem.