Laying the ghost of Perón

This week the newly elected Mauricio Macri was sworn in as president of Argentina, replacing a generation of Peronists. Can he unite a country troubled by poverty and corruption, issues that Pope Francis frequently highlighted in his days as Archbishop of Buenos Aires?

A new chapter in Latin American politics has been opened up with the election of Mauricio Macri, a ­businessman and former football club boss, as president of Argentina . It follows a ­historic victory over the main candidate ­representing the Peronist party, whose ideological current and factions have dominated Argen­tinian politics since the Second World War.

Within hours of his election, Macri, who was sworn in this week, reassured everyone that he would build his presidency on the basis of consensus. In contrast to the outgoing president, the radical Peronist Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, he was shown during the campaign not to be combative by nature, and with a record free of cronyism. This appears to have appealed to voters disillusioned by the confrontation and corruption that came to characterise the 12-year rule of Kirchner, who succeeded her late husband, Néstor, as president.

“What is clear is that this is a victory for a different way of doing politics: a way that is open to dialogue and is measured, not messianic,” commented the leading Argentinian Catholic journal, Criterio, in an editorial.

Macri’s coalition, known as Cambiemos – “We can change” – secured a narrow, ­second-round victory after an intensely contested presidential election that saw the electorate split between three main groups. The first, comprising loyal supporters of Kirchner’s Frente para la Victoria (the FPV, or Front for Victory), backed her late husband’s former vice president, the outgoing governor of Buenos Aires province, Daniel Scioli.

The second was a smaller group of dissident Peronists, who backed Sergio Massa. The third, Macri’s own voters, was an alliance of conservatives, members of the other trad­itional party, the centre-Left Unión Civica Radical (the UCR, or Radical Civic Union), and a large section of the electorate that simply wanted a clean break from the past.

Despite coming from an Italian immigrant family, Macri is no rags-to-riches politician. His fortune derives from his businessman father, Franco, who made his money out of lucrative contracts during the bloody­­ military regime that engineered a coup in 1976 and collapsed in 1982 after the Falklands War. The family firm, whose interests straddled construction, finance and manufacturing, adapted well to Argentina’s transition to civilian government, despite some run-ins with the judiciary over alleged trading malpractice, and thanks to good relations with the Government of Carlos Menem, which liberalised the economy during the 1990s.

Mauricio’s decision to enter politics followed his kidnapping in 1991 – and his release after the family reportedly paid a multi-million-dollar ransom. At the age of 36, he became president of Argentina’s most popular football club, the Buenos Aires-based Boca Juniors. His term in office, from 1996 to 2008, was the most successful in the club’s history and acted as a springboard when he formed his centre-Right Republican Proposal, or PRO, in 2003.

Three years later, Macri was elected to Congress and, in 2007, he became mayor of Buenos Aires, subsequently reducing the city’s crime rate and improving its public transport and environment to the benefit of residents and tourists alike. Despite being caricatured by the Peronists as a ruthless capitalist, his popularity grew in line with his reputation for efficiency, compromise and transparency.

His election may have benefited from the impartiality of Pope Francis, who in his days as a Jesuit priest had shown some sympathy for the Peronist cause. This time, the only public comment Francis made was to urge people to “vote with their consciences”. The advice was dutifully echoed in a statement by Argentina’s bishops, along with other Bergoglio concepts, such as the need to vote for a “culture of encounter and respect” , “social friendship” and “genuine dialogue”.

If the Church was relatively discreet during the campaign, it was largely because Macri and Scioli were both pro-life – as Kirchner had been – and there was no offer to liberalise the country’s restrictive abortion laws on abortion. Macri’s campaign was not derailed by media reports recalling criticisms of him by the then Cardinal Bergoglio for encouraging the first gay marriage ceremony in Buenos Aires during his time as mayor.

Nor did HE lose votes because his own ­marital status – thrice married with four ­children after two divorces – was not in line with church teaching. In fact, his admission to being a non-practising Catholic could apply to a majority of middle-class Argentinians,  who now look to Pope Francis for guidance on political morality as well as a less dogmatic attitude towards remarriage and other areas of their private lives.

On balance, the memory of Bergoglio’s denunciation of corruption during the Kirchner regimes probably tipped many disillusioned voters in favour of Macri. During the campaign, some priests in the shanty neighbourhoods clashed with Aníbal Fernández, one of the Kirchners’ closest allies and the candidate for the governorship of Buenos Aires, because of his alleged links with drug trafficking.

In the event, Fernández was defeated by María Eugenia Vidal, the former deputy mayoress under Macri and the first woman (and first non-Peronist since 1987) to be voted into this office. The province of Buenos Aires includes 40 per cent of the country’s population, and is thus a key political fiefdom.

Although Kirchner’s FPV has retained control of the senate – and could therefore block some of Macri’s legislation until at least mid-term elections in two years’ time – several governors support the new president, making it easier to ensure co-participation in tax ­revenue raising, historically a source of tension in Argentina’s weak federal system. Meanwhile, his ministerial appointments ­suggest a pragmatic approach.

His father, Franco, now 85, declared recently that his son had “the brain to be president, but not the heart”. Certainly by the time Francis makes his first visit home since his election as Pope – probably within the next year or so – Macri will need to have shown he can inspire a sense of the common good, a tough call in a country not best-known for its collective grasp of true democracy.

Jimmy Burns is a specialist writer on Latin America and author of Francis: Pope of good promise, published by Constable.