Buenos Aires Governor Axel Kicillof says Peronism, Argentina’s main opposition movement, should choose its 2027 presidential candidate in a primary. Allies of former President Cristina Kirchner answered that her choice made him the party’s candidate for governor in 2019.
Kicillof told about 40 mayors from his political movement at a meeting in La Plata earlier this week that he will not accept candidates settled by deals among party leaders and is ready to compete in a primary against Sergio Massa, a former economy minister who ran for president in 2023, or other Peronists, according to people who attended. On Friday, Oct. 30, during a visit to the northern province of Jujuy, he told the newspaper El Tribuno that the best course is to let the people decide.
Figures in La Cámpora, the movement led by Cristina Kirchner’s son, Máximo Kirchner, answered on X on Saturday. Fernanda Raverta, a former head of ANSES, the national pension agency, wrote to Kicillof that it is “always curious to hear those who were its great beneficiaries disown the ‘finger,’” Argentine slang (“dedo”) for a candidate hand-picked from above. She said some people show courage in challenging Kirchner just now that she is detained, and added: “We would gladly compete in a primary against any comrade in the popular camp. And we would do it with Cristina.” Emmanuel González Santalla, a Buenos Aires provincial senator, also recalled that Kirchner’s choice made Kicillof the party’s candidate for governor in 2019.
Kirchner, a two-term president who later served as vice president, is under house arrest, serving a six-year sentence for fraud in public works contracts, and is barred for life from public office, so she cannot run unless the ban is lifted. Her allies, who call the ban a proscription, have taken her case to the United Nations, and Raverta’s reply says her camp would back Kirchner in a primary.
Whether Peronism gets such a contest depends partly on the national primaries known as the PASO, the open, simultaneous and compulsory contests in which parties choose their candidates. The law sets them for the second Sunday of August, which is Aug. 8 in 2027, ahead of the October vote. The governing party wants to suspend them for 2027 but lacks the Senate votes. If they are suspended, each party would choose its candidates on its own, by an internal vote or a deal.
Kicillof, who heads the Buenos Aires branch of the Justicialist Party, the main Peronist party, has called its provincial council to meet at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 4, in La Plata. The council is due to move ahead with calling the party’s provincial congress, planned for November. Under a deal the two camps struck early this year, Máximo Kirchner is due to chair the congress, but they still disagree over who sits on its leadership bodies.