Although he does not say it in public, President Alberto Fernández thinks the same as the Peronist governors of northern Argentina: he believes that suspend this year’s primary elections. He knows, however, that in order to avoid the first electoral round of the year, he has to get part of the opposition of Together for Change agree to vote with the government in Congress in the modification of the electoral norm that makes the elections mandatory to define the candidates of the electoral alliances. “If there is no consensus, the PASO cannot be suspended”, A man who traveled with the President to Chile told this newspaper.
Today, according to the ruling party itself in the Chamber of Deputies, this difficulty is insurmountable. “There are no votes”, He told this Wednesday to Clarion an important deputy from the Frente de Todos. The initiative of the Chaco Jorge Capitanich to bring six governors to Congress – among them the radicals Gerardo Morales and Gustavo Valdés – to propose the suspension today is bogged down.
Together for Change he defined several weeks ago that he will defend the PASO with a conviction that he did not have while he was in office. The principle that mandated that decision is quite simple: “If it is something that the Casa Rosada is promoting, the opposite is convenient for the opposition”.
In addition to the possibility of blocking the suspension in Congress, Juntos por el Cambio has an additional resource to frustrate the President’s plans, because it can keep the turns of the PASO in force to elect local positions in the Federal Capital and also in the Province of Buenos Aires. In this last district, the ruling party would need at least four Buenos Aires senators to turn around and vote against their bloc. A changemaker leader of the province who is very angry with Mauricio Macri goes through the Peronist offices assuring that he has the key to achieve those four pirouettes, but he did not get – at least until this week – that in the Frente de Todos take that proposal seriously.
If Buenos Aires and the Capital decide to maintain the PASO, the health argument that the Nation uses will lose its meaning, because people will have to go to vote anyway in those districts, which concentrate almost half of Argentine voters. In addition to the provincial positions in Capital and Buenos Aires, another nine provinces will define legislative positions and even Santiago del Estero and Corrientes will have to define governor. Some of those provinces also have local PASO.
The Government estimates that, if the August votes are suspended, it will have more time to wait for a recovery in the economy. Today, with the vaccination plans more and more tangled, that picture is darkening.
In addition to the opposition, which has already said that it will seek to keep the PASO alive, the Government will have to enlist the support of Cristina Kirchner for the suspension. The vice president maintains considerable power in various spaces of administration, but there is an area where it has it all. In defining the official electoral strategy, his word is holy. She was the one who created the Frente de Todos, she was the one who nominated Alberto Fernández to head the formula and she was the one who contributed the vast majority of the votes to return to the Government.
In the last year, there is no indication that this situation has changed.
So until the vice president speaks in public on the issue, the definitions will be as unstable as they can be.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/the-governments-plan-to-suspend-the-paso-increasingly-cold/
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