Argentine Vote a Big Victory for Alfonsin

Argentine President Raul Alfonsin, an avuncular and determined democrat who decreed slash-and-burn assaults on runaway inflation and right-wing extremism, won a national vote of confidence here Sunday in midterm congressional elections.

Projections by Argentine news media and political parties late Sunday made Alfonsin’s center-left Radical Civic Union party the comfortable winner in the elections.

The projections gave his party 47% nationwide, easily outdistancing its nearest rivals of right and left in multi-party races. The Radicals ran well in metropolitan Buenos Aires, but their vote was particularly impressive in interior provinces, which have been traditional bastions of opposition parties.

With about half of nationwide returns officially counted early today, the Radicals had 45%. Peronist moderates ran second with 16%, and right-wing Peronists were third with about 11%.

As tooting caravans celebrated the Radical victory through downtown streets early today, the Argentine media projected that Alfonsin would marginally improve his two-vote pre-electoral majority in the lower house of Congress. The government’s television station projected a Radical party gain of two seats.

Voting was heavy--over 80% nationwide--and orderly in Argentina’s first midterm elections in 20 years. They were also the first elections held under a state of siege, imposed last month by Alfonsin to counter right-wing terrorists but restricted in its application so that it did not affect campaigning.

Running on the popular Alfonsin’s coattails, his party sought to solidify its tenuous control of the Chamber of Deputies: “Don’t Tie His Hands,” urged Radical campaign posters emblazoned with Alfonsin’s picture.

Going into Sunday’s election, the Radicals held 129 of 254 seats in the lower house of a Congress elected in 1983 at the end of nearly nine years of military dictatorship.

Peronist Party Divided

The Peronists, who dominated Argentine politics for 40 years, have never recovered from the 1983 defeat, which left them with 111 seats. Peronist legislators have since splintered into four rival factions.

Two mutually hostile Peronist groupings were the Radical party’s principal opposition here in the capital and the adjoining province of Buenos Aires, which between them account for half of Argentina’s 18.6 million voters.

Nationwide, more than 6,000 posts were up for grabs Sunday in 15 of Argentina’s 22 provinces, ranging from national congressmen to provincial legislators and local officials.

Besides the Radicals, the divided Peronists and a gaggle of provincial and minor parties, there were in some provinces major campaigns by conservatives, non-Marxist leftists and a coalition of Communists, Socialists and left-wing Peronists. A proportional system of seat apportionment, which favors minority parties, assured broad representation at the national and many local levels.

Alfonsin’s Policies Attacked

When they were not preoccupied squabbling among themselves, the Peronists attacked Alfonsin for having surrendered to foreign creditors of Argentina’s nearly $50-billion foreign debt. His policies, the Peronists argued, have doomed the country to prolonged recession.

Radicals, by contrast, praised Alfonsin for a Draconian midyear economic reform that included price and wage freezes and creation of a new currency. Inflation, then running at around 1,000% on an annual basis, has been reduced to around 2% per month, but at the cost of sharp declines in real income, which the Radicals’ opponents sought to exploit.

On the eve of the election, and at the risk of staining his democratic credentials, Alfonsin imposed a 60-day state of siege to combat small-scale terrorism that included about 70 bombings and nearly 2,000 bomb threats, many of them aimed at schools and public buildings.