Argentines Plan Protest Ballots

During the worst years of Argentina’s military dictatorship, it was a form of rebellion. The law said you had to vote. So you went to your polling place but secretly crossed out the names of the dictator’s candidates. You voted for no one.

Today, millions of Argentines once again are expected to vote for no one, even as the ballot offers them a veritable buffet of democratic choices. They will do so, according to pollsters and analysts, as a form of protest against a deepening economic crisis.

“I’m going to invalidate my vote,” said Maria Fernandez, a 35-year-old government employee whose salary has been cut 45% in the past year. “I don’t believe I can vote for anyone who can change what’s happening.”

The midterm election is for seats in both houses of the National Congress. It is widely seen here as a referendum on the “zero deficit” policies of President Fernando de la Rua and his economy minister, Domingo Cavallo.

A Gallup poll of Buenos Aires residents found more people planning to cast blank or nullified ballots (25%) than to vote for any one of the two dozen or so parties on the ballot, including the ruling Alliance coalition and the leading opposition party, the Peronists.

Pollsters predict that more people will nullify their votes in this election than in any since the country returned to civilian rule in 1983. Some will write in the names of dead presidents and 19th century military heroes. Others will place blank pieces of paper and other objects in place of ballots in their voting envelopes.

“I’m going to drop in a condom,” said a 47-year-old taxi driver as he waited for a fare in the upscale Recoleta district here. “Let them try and count that.”

Such an open rejection of the system is a dramatic change in a country where politics is a passion second only to soccer and where a 96% literacy rate has given rise to a vibrant civic culture.

“You can’t say people are simply choosing not to vote for the politicians,” columnist Mariano Grondona wrote Wednesday in the daily La Nacion. “They’re voting against them.”

For months now, the mood here has been one of impending doom. Faced with a growing foreign debt and pressure from the International Monetary Fund to reduce spending, De la Rua has cut pensions and slashed government salaries. He also has sharply reduced payments to provincial governments.

In recent weeks, De la Rua’s government repeatedly has denied rumors that the president was about to devalue the peso or fire Cavallo. Television broadcasts are filled with reports of building takeovers in provincial capitals by disgruntled state employees.

One in four Argentines lives in poverty, and many here believe that meeting the terms of an $8.4-billion IMF loan approved in August is only driving their nation deeper into penury. Unemployment has soared past 16%.

“People here are angry, and not just at De la Rua,” said Roberto Bacman, a pollster with the firm CEOP. “Their anger is directed at the political class in general.”

Few of the nation’s most recognized politicians seem to be free of the taint of corruption and incompetence. The leading Peronist figure, former President Carlos Menem, is under house arrest and facing arms trafficking charges.

Members of the center-left coalition that brought De la Rua to power in 1999 have started to turn on one another. One of the most charismatic members of the president’s Radical party, congressional Deputy Elisa Carrio, has split off and formed a new party, the Alternative for a Republic of Equals.

Like other commentators here, pollster Bacman is troubled by the increase in voter antipathy, calling it a “warning light” for Argentine democracy. This is, after all, a country with still fresh memories of military juntas and political assassinations.

“If there were a general waiting in the wings, they would support a coup,” columnist Grondona wrote, referring to those expected to cast blank or nullified votes. “But there isn’t any such general. So who do they want?”

Maria Luisa Arredondo, 57, said it is difficult to find a politician she can stomach. She rattled off the names of the best-known candidates for Senate in Buenos Aires, finding a reason to reject each.

After much thinking, Arredondo mentioned someone she could vote for: Irma Roy, a 65-year-old actress running for Congress. “She represents the old-time Peronism.”

Today’s election is not expected to alter the balance of power in the Chamber of Deputies, where no group can claim a majority of the 257 seats, or in the 72-member Senate, where the Peronists are expected to retain their majority.

Whatever the result, political analyst Manuel Mora y Araujo doesn’t believe that there will be much of a change in the government’s economic policies.

“The government wasn’t popular before the election,” he said. “And it will still be unpopular afterward.”

Pollsters do expect an increasing number of Argentines to vote for the “little parties” that fill out the ballot, a disparate collection of regional, leftist, conservative and environmental movements.

Natalia Carra, a 19-year-old student at the Catholic University here in the capital, said she would vote for one of those parties, although she wasn’t sure which.

“I know that all these people are rotten, but voting blank or nullifying your ballot seems to me a way of separating myself from the process,” Carra said. “I don’t want my first vote ever to be a blank one.”