(Buenos Aires) Argentinian Vice-President Cristina Kirchner forcefully reaffirmed on Tuesday that she will not be a candidate in the October presidential election, despite calls from supporters to do so, for fear of being “banned” by a justice according to her partial.
“I already said it in December 2022. I will not be the plaything of power for any candidacy”, writes Mme Kirchner, 70, in an open letter posted on his site and social media. “It was not a decision under pressure or on the spot, but reasoned, and thought out”.
“We need to get out of the trap they are setting for us,” she adds, targeting the opposition, and a judicial apparatus according to her “operating since 2016 as a ‘task force’ of Juntos por el Cambio”, the coalition right-wing opposition.
“I will not enter into the perverse game that they impose on us […] so that these same judges […] dictate a judgment that would disqualify or remove any candidacy of mine,” she wrote.
She therefore calls on the (center left) bloc in power, including its Peronist current, “to build a government program that Argentines can fall in love with”. But refrain from mentioning a possible candidate.
President from 2007 to 2015, Vice-President since 2019, Mme Kirchner remains a central figure on the Argentine left, a leader of Peronism – and dedicated to influencing the choice of a candidate from this camp for the election.
In December 2022, she already announced that she would not run for office in 2023, shortly after her conviction in a trial for fraud and corruption – which she denies – during her presidential terms.
She had been sentenced to six years in prison and life ineligibility, sentences from which parliamentary immunity preserved her, and which would only be effective after several years and many appeals.
On several occasions since, she has rebuffed the footsteps of Peronist supporters chanting at each rally “Cristina president! “. “No, no, president, no […] I have already given what I had to give”, she recalled again at the end of April during a rally in La Plata.
This did not prevent several politicians from his camp from repeating in recent weeks that they only saw it as a solution, and from hoping that it would declare itself, five months before the election, and while the country bogged down in endless inflation (108% year-on-year).
This repeated withdrawal of Mme Kirchner, and the announcement in April by President Alberto Fernandez that he will not run again, leave an open and uncertain field in the government camp. Even if Daniel Scioli, a former vice-president and unsuccessful candidate in 2015, pre-positioned himself. And if many media lend intentions to the Minister of the Economy Sergio Massa, also a candidate in 2015.