Country’s opposition struggles to unite against Milei

AVELLANEDA (AP):

Several nights a week, scores of supporters of Argentina’s divisive former president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, gather outside the French-style apartment building in Buenos Aires where she is under house arrest, beating drums, blaring trumpets and chanting, “Cristina for president!”

After about an hour, Fernández gives them what they came for: She steps onto the third-floor balcony – as close as she can get to the crowds below while serving her six-year corruption sentence – and waves with both hands.

“I not only have hope. I have certainty that Cristina will be freed and will return as president,” said Graciela Nadal, 66, who keeps daily vigil outside Fernández’s home with other members of the Cristina Libre, or Free Cristina, movement, an almost cult-like group demanding the release of the former leader.

More than a year after the Supreme Court upheld her conviction for defrauding the state during her two terms as president, from 2007 to 2015, and banned her from holding office for life, Fernández remains among the most polarising figures in Argentina and the most influential living leader of Peronism, the populist movement focused on labor rights that has dominated Argentine politics since the 1940s.

To some, she is a political prisoner, punished for standing up to powerful interests. To others, she personifies the corruption and economic mismanagement that have roiled Argentina for decades.

BIG OPPORTUNITY

But, just over a year before libertarian President Javier Milei seeks re-election, Peronism’s enduring obsession with the 73-year-old former president is taking a toll, undermining its attempt to shape a political alternative just as frustration with Milei’s austerity programme gives the movement an opening.

“The Opposition is in a big mess. And they now have a big opportunity,” said Marcelo J. García, Americas director at the risk consultancy Horizon Engage. “How they resolve their problems of narrative and leadership will be crucial.”

The stakes extend beyond Milei’s free-market experiment. The Opposition’s efforts to regroup and respond to Milei, politicians say, could become a test case for progressive movements across Latin America reeling from a string of election losses and struggling under pressure from the Trump administration.

At a recent rally outside Fernández’s home marking the anniversary of the 2022 assassination attempt against her, Máximo Kirchner, her son and a Peronist lawmaker, spoke at length about the movement’s past – just not its recent past.

To thunderous applause, Kirchner praised the expansive welfare programmes of his mother’s presidency, which ended over a decade ago. But he said nothing about her subsequent term as vice-president under Alberto Fernández (2019-2023), whose administration presided over the triple-digit inflation that helped vault Milei to power in 2023 on a pledge to shrink the government.

“Those were better years –years in which thousands upon thousands of Argentine families lived better than they do now,” Kirchner said of his mother’s earlier tenure.

Through dramatic budget cuts, Milei has stabilised Argentina’s currency and brought annual inflation down from nearly 300 per cent in 2024 to just over 30 per cent this year. But many Argentines have yet to see the economic revival that he promised would follow the pain: Paycheques buy less, utilities cost more and jobs are disappearing as cheap imports pummel local industry.

The Peronists won roughly a third of the vote in last year’s midterms, and remain Milei’s likeliest challengers in a presidential runoff next year. Even from her wrought-iron balcony, analysts say, Fernández has held back potential successors to pursue her own comeback.

She recently took her case to the UN Human Rights Committee, challenging her conviction and disqualification from public office on the grounds of political persecution. But a favourable UN ruling alone would not put her back on the ballot, as Argentine courts would still have to lift the ban. Undeterred, her devotees continue their efforts to free their icon.