The Argentine province of Chubut contains only 1 percent of the country’s population, but accounts for 30 and 8 percent of its respective petroleum and natural gas production. On Oct. 25, concurrent with Argentina’s presidential and congressional elections, Chubut residents went to the polls to choose the province’s governor who will assume office in December for a four-year term. In a very close race, former governor Mario Das Neves (2003-2011) defeated the incumbent governor Martin Buzzi (2011-15). Also selected were the 27 members of the unicameral provincial legislature and more than two-dozen mayors.
There were four gubernatorial candidates, but the real contest was between Buzzi and Das Neves, both of whom belong to Argentina’s large and robust Peronist movement. Buzzi ran under the banner of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s Front for Victory (FPV) alliance while Das Neves created his own party, We’re All Chubut (CHUSOTO), to compete in this year’s election.
Due to the Chubut constitution’s limit of two consecutive terms, Das Neves was unable to run for re-election in 2011, and had handpicked Buzzi as his successor. Buzzi was Minister of Production during Das Neves’ first term, and then with Das Neves’ support was elected mayor of Chubut’s largest city (and petroleum capital), Comodoro Rivadavia, in 2007. In 2011 Buzzi won the governorship by a very small margin over the FPV’s Carlos Eliceche. Relatively soon after assuming office, Buzzi broke with Das Neves, setting the stage for yesterday’s battle.
Das Neves won 41.3 percent of the vote, just slightly more than Buzzi’s 40.7 percent (with 95.5 percent of precincts reporting). Carlos Lorenzo of the We Can Change alliance of opposition presidential candidate Mauricio Macri finished third with 14.9 percent and Oscar Petersen of the small left wing Social Pole Movement garnered the remaining 3.1 percent.
Under Chubut election law, the 27 legislators are elected from a province-wide closed list, with the party winning a plurality of the vote receiving 16 seats and the 11 other seats allocated among the remaining parties based on their proportional share of the vote. On Sunday, Buzzi’s FPV won 16 seats, Das Neves’ CHUSOTO 8 seats and We Can Change 3 seats. The FPV legislative list slightly outperformed Buzzi (41.8 percent of the vote to 40.7 percent). Das Neves notably outperformed the CHUSOTO list, 41.3 percent to 37.7 percent, drawing the support of many We Can Change voters who cast a Das Neves ballot for governor and a We Can Change ballot for the provincial legislature.
While Das Neves will begin his tenure without a formal CHUSOTO legislative majority, this should not represent any difficulty for governance in the province. Das Neves is now the most prominent and powerful Peronist in Chubut, and a majority of the FPV legislators will sooner or later flock to Das Neves following the Peronist tradition of rallying under the undisputed leader, a leader who holds the keys to the state resources, contracts, jobs and other benefits that are the lifeblood of Peronist politics in Argentina.
Mark P. Jones is the Baker Institute’s fellow in political science as well as the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies at Rice University.
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