Kicillof and the frustrated desire to be art and part
The conflict sparked by the closing of lists in the three major coalitions that will compete in the September 7 elections in the province of Buenos Aires has its effects on the official announcement, on August 17, of the candidates for national deputies for the October 26 elections. This is one of the consequences of the split ordered by Axel Kicillof. If he foresaw them, he probably didn't speculate on how adverse they could be. Especially given some details of his apparent original plan, revealed by the registration of Fuerza Patria's lists for September 7.
This procedure confirmed that Kicillof had registered his own candidates with another party while negotiating the inclusion of several of them in Fuerza Patria. It's curious that he claims to have a stake in it, and particularly a stake in it. That's the acronym that identifies Alberto Fernández 's Party of Labor and Equity (PARTE), the vehicle he used to take this step, which raised fears of a split on July 19, the last deadline for candidate registration.
It's not entirely clear whether Kicillof previously notified Cristina, Máximo , and Sergio Massa of his intentions. What does seem certain is that the governor will struggle to avoid being compared to the former president. This is the least-reported argument among those who urged him to split the party to emancipate himself from Cristina. Manuel Luaces had to legally waive his right to run on September 7 to avoid the double registration of several candidates.
Luaces is the head of the PARTE party and representative, thanks to which Juan José Mussi boasted of his foresight and registered a local candidate list headed by himself before the rest. Berazategui's case was one of the eighty cases of mayors who were going to present themselves as token candidates without joining the Fuerza Patria sectional lists. Jorge Ferraresi from Avellaneda; Mario Secco from Ensenada; and Lucas Ghi from Morón are some of the most notable examples of a strategy that Vice Governor Verónica Magario and Gabriel Katopodis could hardly have ignored.
The Infrastructure Minister was listed as a candidate on both lists. The widespread suspicion within Kirchnerism is that the mayors linked to Kicillof planned to distribute their local ballots to the candidates of the "Somos Buenos Aires" party in the eight electoral districts. This questioning overlapped with the fact that Magario and Katopodis were considered token candidates, which jeopardized their leadership of the lists in the Third and First Sections.
These were the hours in which Mariano Cascallares and Federico Achával could have replaced them. The mayor of Almirante Brown is in fourth place behind Magario to renew the deputy seat he hasn't held in the last three and a half years. The Pilar mayor urgently needs to put behind him his ties to Jorge D'Onofrio , whose investigation is pending in three federal courts. D'Onofrio is accused of illicit enrichment and money laundering for his tenure as Kicillof's Minister of Transportation.
Claudia Pombo presided over the Pilar City Council thanks to Achával, until Kicillof asked D'Onofrio to resign. Pombo is suspected of being an accomplice in the former minister's alleged criminal schemes, perpetrated with alleged bribes linked to photo-tickets. D'Onofrio also succeeded in getting the Legislature to expropriate a 12-hectare property linked to a private enterprise in 2020. The Federal Court suspended the expropriation and rejected Achával's request to be a plaintiff in that case.
The municipality of Pilar occupied land on that property. The expropriation was approved in 2020, when D'Onofrio was a congressman. Achával was excluded from the list of candidates for senator in the First Section. Julio Alak anticipated this uproar before the blackout that shed light on the closing of the lists. The incident was attributed to Sergio Massa due to his ties to Edelap, the energy distributor of the Vila-Manzano group, headed by Jorge "El corcho" Rodríguez.
Despite being the mayor closest to Kicillof, the La Plata mayor vetoed Carlos Bianco's candidate for deputy for the Eighth Section. The Minister of Government and Development, Andrés "El Cuervo" Larroque , are accused by La Cámpora of being the ringleaders of Kicillof's clumsy rebellion. Alak aspires to be governor in 2027. Juan Archanco, of La Cámpora, heads the list of deputies for the Eighth Section. He is followed by Lucía Iáñez and Juan Manuel Malpensi. Iáñez is Alak's niece and will seek reappointment. Malpensi is sponsored by Ráúl Pérez, Massa's influential advisor in the Buenos Aires justice system who allegedly managed to free Julio "Chocolate" Rigau after he was arrested with 48 debit cards in his possession. Alberto Benavídez and Juan Villordo are the judges of the La Plata Court of Appeals who are seeking impeachment for that ruling.
La Cámpora not only secured the 15 candidacies for the legislative positions it needs to renew. It aims to secure a majority of the 12 spots on the list of national deputies that will be registered on August 17 to compete on October 26. The governor will arrive weakened by his setback. No one knows if it was before or after that dark turmoil that Massa took advantage of to offer the Nuevos Aires party to those excluded from Somos Buenos Aires.
Nuevos Aires is reportedly in the hands of Gastón Duek , the apparent precursor of the fake news spread in political campaigns through armies of trolls. Nuevos Aires is the force with which Nicolás Massot will compete again in Tigre. Just like his boss, Emilio Monzó , banned from Somos Buenos Aires by Juan Schiarett i, in an apparent continuation of the conflict between the former governor of Córdoba and Massa, when the latter abandoned federal Peronism in 2019 to ally himself with Cristina.
Schiaretti is Julio Zamora 's main supporter, hoping that the Legislature will be the venue for the ongoing power struggle in Tigre. The mayor is Somos Buenos Aires's leading candidate in the First Section, and Malena Galmarini is the runner-up for Fuerza Patria. Zamora already defeated Galmarini with a local ballot in the 2023 PASO (Primary Primary Elections). The Unión por la Patria Electoral Board prevented him from putting Massa forward as his presidential candidate.
But Nuevos Aires will also serve Maximiliano Abad in resolving the crisis with Evolución over control of the Buenos Aires UCR (United Nations Children's Fund). The national senator is at odds with the faction led by Emiliano Giacobitti and Martin Lousteau. Evolución is affiliated with "Somos Buenos Aires" (We Are Buenos Aires). Abad refuses to maintain his alliance with Guillermo Montenegro in General Pueyrredón. The mayor will be a candidate in the Fifth Section for the alliance that includes the PRO (Project of the Nationalist Party) but monopolizes La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances).
Like Diego Valenzuela of Tres de Febrero, Montenegro denies being a token candidate. Both insist they will take their seats. No one wants to confirm that it's to obey an order from Karina Milei . This supposed metamorphosis is attributed to Cristian Ritondo 's quitting smoking. Or at least in front of Javier Milei . The President doesn't tolerate tobacco smoke. Nor does he tolerate insubordination to the family clan, as Santiago Caputo already knows.
In the Zoom call Ritondo shared with Macri the day before yesterday, he didn't reveal the secret to overcoming that habit. He didn't reveal the secret of having begun his relationship with the president through the presidential advisor and consolidating it thanks to Karina: Caputo's great antagonist. What he did talk about was his concern about the September 7 audit. Apparently, those left out of the agreements he made with Sebastián Parejá would have no incentive to do so. There would be too many of them.
Will those excluded from the September 7 election be compensated with a spot on October 26? Pareja first has the Maximiliano Bondarenko case to deal with. Kicillof's Security Minister, Javier Alonso, denounced him as part of an alleged plot by 24 high-ranking officers of the Buenos Aires police to disrupt the institutional order within that force. Bondarenko is a former commissioner who participated in the official security detail of Néstor Kirchner and Felipe Solá. Perhaps this background allows for speculation about his ties to the Peronist faction in Florencio Varela, where he was a councilman. This echoes the ones Pareja allegedly maintains with leaders of that sector, particularly Massa. Pareja was Monzó's subordinate. Andrés Watson is the mayor of Florencio Varela and an ally of Kicillof. Is this a diversionary maneuver to conceal the governor's alleged political uprising?
Just like the questions surrounding the security detail, it's not just Kicillof who is jogging the memory of Cristina and Alberto Fernández. Last week, Federal Judge María Eugenia Capuchetti ordered the opening of Gerardo Milman's phone, one of the pieces of evidence in the case investigating the federal police officers who were guarding the former president's home the night of the attack. Sources involved in the investigation claim that this task was entrusted to personnel linked to the Intelligence Department, not to personnel specialized in that service. Despite the fact that they gave testimony before the Federal Court of Justice No. 6 for the attack, Capuchetti has not ruled out summoning them as defendants. The judge is also reportedly waiting for Ariel Lijo to resolve the case in which he accused Martin Mena of concealment, which is being investigated by prosecutor Franco Piccard .
Mena is Kicillof's Minister of Security. Like Piccardi, he was an official in the Ministry of Justice during Alak's administration. True to his peculiar doctrine, Lijo has had the case paralyzed for nine months.
lanacion
