ID:122468
    Date:2007-09-17 15:00:00
    Origin:07BUENOSAIRES1862
    Source:Embassy Buenos Aires
    Classification:CONFIDENTIAL
    Dunno:07BUENOSAIRES1730 07BUENOSAIRES978
    Destination:VZCZCXYZ0000
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RUCPDOC/DEPT OF COMMERCE WASHINGTON DC

    
C O N F I D E N T I A L BUENOS AIRES 001862 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: DECL: 09/20/2017 
TAGS: PGOV, PREL, AR, ECON 
SUBJECT: ARGENTINA: ELECTIONS 2007 WEEKLY ROUNDUP: SEPTEMBER 4-14 
 
REF: A. BUENOS AIRES 01730 
     B. BUENOS AIRES 00978 
 
Classified By: CDA Tom Kelly for Reasons 1.4(b) and (d). 
 
1.  (SBU)  SUMMARY:  Ticket slates for the national 
elections on October 28 are now final.  First Lady and 
presidential front-runner Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is 
still leading the polls with a comfortable lead over the 
next-closest candidate and stands to benefit from her 
husband's increased campaigning on her behalf.  The 
September 2 provincial elections in Cordoba and Santa Fe 
showed that the urban middle class continues to vote 
against the Kirchner ticket.  The second-place finisher in 
Cordoba is demanding a recount, alleging fraud 
and irregularities in that province's September 2 
election.  In Buenos Aires, Mayor-Elect Mauricio Macri has 
begun wooing candidates to fill positions in the city 
government, including Federal Judge Guillermo Montenegro of 
the Skanska corruption case.  In the last provincial 
elections before October, Kirchnerista candidates triumphed 
in both Chaco and Chubut, adding to a string of provincial 
wins for the administration that counter the handful of 
opposition victories.  END SUMMARY. 
 
---------------------- 
The Race for President 
---------------------- 
 
2.  (SBU)  Senator and First Lady Cristina Fernandez de 
Kirchner's healthy lead over the next-closest presidential 
candidate remains steady.  President Nestor Kirchner has 
intensified his campaigning on behalf of his wife, 
with appearances in San Miguel, Rio Gallegos, Catamarca, 
and Tigre.  With the official deadline of September 8 to 
register candidates for the national elections on October 
28 now passed, the official lists for each party are final. 
On September 8, fourteen tickets registered to compete for 
the presidential seat in October.  The Peronist party will 
compete under two denominations: President Kirchner's Victory 
Front (FPV) and the dissident Peronist group Justice, Unity, 
and Liberty Front (Frejuli).  The traditional Radical party 
(UCR) will not present its own candidates, but will take part 
in a coalition embracing Radicals, some dissident Peronists, 
and other minor parties.  Leftist parties could not reach an 
agreement to join forces and will be competing under six 
different tickets: FRAL, MIJD, FITS, Workers' Party, MST-New 
Left, and South Project. 
 
3.  (SBU) FPV is running First Lady and Senator Cristina 
Fernandez de Kirchner for president and Mendoza Governor 
Julio Cobos of the UCR for vice president.  FREJULI's 
candidate is San Juan Governor Alberto Rodriguez Saa, whose 
running mate is Hector Maya.  One Advanced Nation (UNA) -- 
a coalition of parties led by the remnants of the Radical 
(UCR) party -- supports former Kirchnerista Economy 
Minister Roberto Lavagna for president and Gerardo Morales 
for vice president.  The Civic Coalition formed to support 
Buenos Aires Mayor Jorge Telerman's bid for reelection in 
June and comprising several center-left parties supports 
center-left leader Elisa Carrio and her running-mate 
Socialist Senator Ruben Giustiniani.  Center-right RECREAR 
party has registered Ricardo Lopez Murphy and Esteban 
Bullrich as its presidential and vice-presidential 
candidates.  This ticket is supported by Lopez Murphy's 
former political partner Buenos Aires Mayor-elect Mauricio 
Macri, but Macri is not supporting RECREAR's list of 
candidates for other positions.  Lopez Murphy is 
concurrently running for National Congressman in the 
province of Buenos Aires. 
 
4.  (SBU)  The other tickets for president and vice 
president include: United Provinces Movement (MPU) Jorge 
Sobisch and Jorge Asis; Popular Party of Reconstruction 
(PRP) Gustavo Breide Obeide and Raul Vergara; Popular 
Loyalty Confederation (CLP) Juan Carlos Mussa and Bernardo 
Nespral; Open Front Towards a United Latin America (FRAL) 
Luis Amman and Rogelio de Leonardi; Independent Movement of 
the Retired and Unemployed (MIJD) Raul Castells and Nina 
Pelozo; Left Front of Workers for Socialism (FITS) Jose 
Monts and Hector Heberling; Polo Obrero (PO) Nestor Pitrola 
and Gabriela Arroyo; New Left (MST) Vilma Ripoll and Hector 
Bidone; Southern Project Fernandeo Solanas and Angel 
Cadelli. 
 
---------------- 
Provincial Races 
---------------- 
 
5.  (SBU)  The September 2 provincial elections in Cordoba 
and Santa Fe -- the second and third largest provinces in 
Argentina -- showed the urban middle class voting against 
Kirchner-backed tickets.  Socialist Hermes Binner won in 
Santa Fe, putting an end to 24 uninterrupted years of 
Peronist rule.  Binner won mostly on the support from 
middle-class voters in the provincial capital Rosario.  In 
Cordoba, Peronist candidate Luis Juez distanced himself from 
the Kirchner ticket and attracted more urban middle-class 
votes than he was projected to receive.  Although four 
leading polling organizations had predicted, on average, that 
Schiaretti would defeat Juez by 12 points, in the end the 
margin was only one percent.  The national and Cordoba 
governments' resistance to a recount has generated suspicions 
that the election was tainted by fraud.  In the last 
provincial elections before October, Kirchnerista candidates 
triumphed in both Chaco and Chubut, adding to a string of 
provincial wins for the administration that counter the 
handful of opposition victories. 
 
Socialist Wins Historic Victory in Santa Fe 
------------------------------------------- 
 
6.  (U)  In Santa Fe, former mayor of Rosario and Socialist 
party candidate Hermes Binner defeated Kirchner-backed 
Victory Front (FPV) candidate Rafael Bielsa to win the 
governorship with 48.59 percent of the vote.  Bielsa received 
38.7 percent of the vote.  Binner is the first Socialist 
candidate in Argentina's history to win a governorship.  His 
win also ends the 24-year Peronist domination of Santa Fe 
politics, which was made possible by a 2004 change in the 
electoral law that mandated primary elections and instituted 
first-past-the-post voting for 
governor has made it easier for opposition parties to succeed 
(ref a). Despite Binner,s substantial lead in exit 
polls, Bielsa's concession speech came notably late, only 
when almost all ballots had been counted. 
 
Cordoba Elections Hotly Contested 
--------------------------------- 
 
7.  (U)  Peronist and current Vice-Governor Juan Schiaretti 
narrowly defeated FPV candidate Luis Juez in the Cordoba 
gubernatorial election by a margin of a contested 1.1 
percent.  Schiaretti won 37.06 percent of the vote while 
Juez obtained 35.95 percent of the vote.  According to the 
provisional count, only 17,000 votes separated the two, 
prompting public cries of electoral fraud by Juez 
supporters culminating in a public protest which mobilized 
20,000-50,000 supporters in the city of Cordoba on 
September 6.  Juez's lawyers appealed to the provincial 
judge overseeing the elections, Marta Vidal, to demand a 
hand recount of every ballot box, citing irregularities 
such as the unusually lengthy 18-hour vote count and a 
50,000 ballot difference between the votes cast for 
governor and those cast for provincial legislators, which 
are usually nearly equal.  (COMMENT:  Ballots in Argentina 
are separated into several sections corresponding to the 
offices up for election.  If voters want to vote for 
different parties, they must tear the ballots for each 
party for which they wish to vote and place the torn 
sections in the voting envelope.  This process takes time 
and effort and is uncommon.  For a vote discrepancy between 
offices to occur, voters would have had to separate the 
portion of the ballot for governor from the rest of the 
ballot and submit only the governor portion.  While not 
impossible, this practice is uncommon and it is improbable 
that 50,000 voters in Cordoba voted only for the office of 
governor.  END COMMENT.)  They also noted that lawyers 
representing the political parties were not present to 
observe when Correo Argentino, the government agency 
charged with running the election, entered the election 
data into its computer system. 
 
8.  (U)  While Vidal agreed there were some irregularities 
and called for a recount, she stipulated that the 
definitive recount will proceed using the vote-count 
telegrams sent from each voting table, not a hand recount 
of every vote cast.  This is in accordance with Argentine 
law, which allows only ballot boxes suspected of being 
tampered with to be opened.  Juez was represented at each 
voting location by party observers who signed the 
vote-count telegrams, which would indicate that a 
vote-by-vote recount is not necessary.  However, Juez's 
camp maintains that the vote-count telegrams could have 
been manipulated either in transit to being entered into 
the database or at the point that the numbers were entered 
into the elections database.  Two weeks after the 
elections, Vidal's office has yet to examine more than 10% 
of the vote-count telegrams. 
 
Chaco 
----- 
9.  (SBU)  FPV candidate and Senator Jorge Capitanich has 
declared himself the winner, by 0.39%, of the September 16th 
elections for governor in Chaco after winning 46.84% of the 
vote..  Pre-election polls predicted a comfortable win by the 
UCR candidate Angel Rozas, who had served as governor of 
Chaco previously from 1995-2003, and who finished second with 
45.45%.  Six voting stations' results had yet to be counted 
as of the morning of September 17, but Capitanich's camp has 
said it feels confident of its victory.  Rozas has said he 
will wait until all of the votes are counted before 
conceding, although he did acknowledge Capitanich's apparent 
lead.  Capitanich and ARI candidate Alicia Terada had 
complained to the electoral authorities of "apocryphal votes" 
and missing ballots at some voting locations, but there have 
been no accusations of malfeasance so far.  Rozas and 
Capitanich previously competed for the governorship of Chaco 
in 1999, when Rozas won with 63.36% over Capitanich's 35.91%. 
 
Chubut 
------ 
10.  (SBU)  Chubut also held elections on September 16th for 
governor and provincial legislators.  Incumbent Kirchnerista 
Governor Mario Das Neves won easily with 71.38% of the vote 
over the other candidates: Raul Barneche of the UCR received 
14.17%, Roque Gonzalez of the Chubut Action Party received 
4.75%, and Guillermo Bonaparte of the center-left ARI 
received 4.17%.  Das Neves's win in 2003 was a surprise 
defeat of the UCR, which had governed the province for the 
previous 12 years.  This election is the worst finish for the 
UCR in Chubut since 1983. 
 
-------------- 
Skanska Update 
-------------- 
 
11. (SBU)  Federal Judge Guillermo Montenegro, who is 
leading the investigation into the alleged bribes received 
by former Argentine government officials working on the 
project to extend the northern gas pipeline (known as the 
Skanska case--REF B), has received an offer from 
Mayor-elect Mauricio Macri to join his cabinet as the new 
Security and Justice Minister in the city of Buenos Aires. 
Concurrently, Vice President and FPV candidate for Buenos 
Aires province governor Daniel Scioli proposed a similar 
deal to the federal prosecutor in the Skanska case Carlos 
Stornelli to become his potential new Security Minister in 
the Buenos Aires province.  There are rumors that 
both professionals would accept the offers, thus leaving 
the Skanska case at a halt for approximately one year. 
According to court sources quoted in local press, one year 
is the estimated time for a new judge and prosecutor to 
study the case from scratch and then move forward with the 
investigation. 
 
12.  (SBU)  Local analysts have said they suspect political 
motivations behind these two offers.  In the case of 
Stornelli, it would seem that the government might be 
trying to stall the investigations of two former 
administration officials accused in the case to prevent 
more negative press about corruption and the 
administration.  In Macri's case, some analysts are 
 
speculating about a possible pact between Macri and the 
Casa Rosada as a sign of mutual tolerance and, eventually, 
as a means of getting Kirchner's compromise to provide the 
city with the funds necessary to finance an autonomous 
police force. 
 
------- 
Comment 
------- 
 
13.  (C)   Fernandez de Kirchner remains poised to win next 
month's presidential elections.  Some elements of the 
fragmented national opposition have seized on the election 
irregularities in Cordoba and the wildly varying 
polling data to press their claims that the Casa Rosada is 
trying to manipulate the outcome of provincial and 
ultimately the national presidential elections.  Two 
presidential candidates, Robert Lavagna and Elisa Carrio, 
have called for international observers to monitor the 
national presidential elections in October.  Although this 
latest round of criticism is unlikely to jeopardize Fernandez 
de Kirchner's chances to win the presidency in October, those 
irregularities have added to doubts about GOA transparency. 
These two election outcomes and the possibility that the 
Kirchners' support among the middle class may be waning 
suggest that Fernandez de Kirchner could face a distinct 
political climate if she wins in October.  Political analysts 
have not only begun to speculate about what a Fernandez de 
Kirchner administration will look like, but also about how 
the Peronists and UCR members of the FPV alliance will 
support her mandate.  END COMMENT. 
KELLY