Menem Gets Vote of Confidence in Argentina

Argentine voters Sunday resurrected the political career of Carlos Menem, the former president incarcerated amid corruption allegations just 16 months ago, giving him first place in balloting to choose a new leader for this troubled South American country.

Menem, 72, will face a Patagonian governor, Nestor Kirchner, in a second round of balloting May 18. The three-week runoff campaign will pit two men from the same Peronist party who nevertheless have markedly different outlooks on how to lift Argentina out of its five-year recession.

Voting in his native northwestern province of La Rioja, Menem promised Argentina he would return the country to the good times of old. When his pregnant wife -- a 37-year-old former Miss Universe -- gives birth to their child later this year, “it will be with a piece of bread under his arm for all Argentines,” Menem said.

Each of Argentina’s major parties -- the Peronists and the Radicals -- split into three factions for the election. Partial results Sunday showed no candidate winning more than 25% of the vote, a measure of the political fragmentation and instability spawned by this country’s economic crash.

The current president, Eduardo Duhalde, called the early elections last year, following several months in office marked by his government’s inability to win a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. Argentina’s public debt stands at $141 billion.

After two years of protest and anger at the political class, during which “Throw them all out!” became a popular refrain, Argentines voted “conservatively,” said political columnist Joaquin Morales Sola.

“Those who voted for Menem voted for a return to the past,” to the boom of the 1990s, he said. And those who voted for Kirchner voted to retain the tenuous sense of stability achieved by the current government and its economy minister, Roberto Lavagna, who has said he will serve in the same post in a Kirchner government.

As of Sunday evening, there were few reports of the voting irregularities many had feared and no signs of election-related violence.

More than 80% of Argentina’s registered voters cast ballots, a large percentage even in a country where those who don’t vote must pay a fine. With nearly three-quarters of the votes counted, Menem had received 24%, followed by Kirchner with 22%.

“This is an important day because the country has voted with complete normality,” Lavagna said. “Argentina has climbed out of its economic crisis, and now it is climbing out of its political crisis.”

Duhalde will step down May 25, about seven months before his term was scheduled to end. After much debate over whether the political parties would hold open primaries, Duhalde agreed to stage the elections as a free-for-all, with three Peronists joining 15 other candidates on a single ballot.

The president threw his support behind Kirchner, the 53-year-old governor of Santa Cruz province. Together, the two men formed the “Front for Victory” faction of the Peronist party.

Observers say Duhalde is determined to deny Menem, his old nemesis, a third term in office and has placed intense pressure on Peronist officials to support Kirchner’s campaign.

The two men developed a strong enmity when Duhalde served as vice president during Menem’s first administration. Duhalde accused Menem of sabotaging his own 1999 presidential campaign.

In recent months, Duhalde’s faction of the Peronist party tried to persuade at least two other Peronist governors to run against Menem in this election, before settling on Kirchner.

Kirchner has portrayed himself as a candidate who will resist the orthodox economics that defined the Menem era, when the U.S. dollar circulated as a second currency.

“This is a campaign between two economic models,” Kirchner told a meeting of foreign correspondents last week. “Between the model of production and employment, and the model that hands over our wealth and our national patrimony to others.”

Menem named his own faction of the Peronist party the “Front for Loyalty” and molded his campaign with strong overtones of nostalgia for the boom days of the early 1990s, when his government privatized most utilities and government services. The Argentine economy then grew at annual rates as high as 18%.

“We lived better before,” reads one of his ubiquitous campaign ads.

After a largely successful first term from 1989 to 1995, Menem reached a pact with the Radical Party to rewrite the constitution, allowing him to be reelected to a second term. When he left office in 1999, Argentina was already in recession and slipping deeper into debt.

Not long after that, Menem became the target of several corruption investigations at home and abroad, including allegations that as president he had received a bribe from the Iranian government to cover up a terrorist bombing in Buenos Aires.

A judge ordered his detention in an arms-trafficking scandal involving the sale of weapons to Croatia. He served several months under house arrest at a suburban mansion until an appeals court ordered him freed in November 2001.

A month later, rioting and protests forced then-President Fernando de la Rua from power halfway into his four-year term. Unable to bring the country’s fiscal crisis under control, De la Rua had frozen most Argentine bank accounts to prevent a collapse of the banking system as Argentines spirited billions of dollars out of the country.

After three other men briefly held the presidency, Congress elected Duhalde in January 2002. Duhalde sharply devaluated the currency and battled with the country’s provincial governors -- including Kirchner -- to control spending.

The last days of the campaign were marked by the surprise climb in the polls of Ricardo Lopez Murphy of the “Recreate Movement.” A conservative former economy minister, Lopez Murphy lagged in fifth place before a spate of well-crafted television ads propelled him to second in many opinion polls.

Results Sunday showed Lopez Murphy finished third, with nearly 17%, followed by another former Radical Party member, Congresswoman Elisa Carrio of the Alliance for a Republic of Equals.

Carrio was the first major candidate to concede defeat. “My movement will not make an alliance with anybody,” she said. “But one thing is clear: We will never vote for Menem.”