Divisive Figure in the Politics of Argentina

The 72-year-old former president stood on the balcony of the fashionable Hotel Presidente a blond starlet on his arm and an election victory in his pocket, just like the man whose name still dominates politics here, the late Juan Domingo Peron.

For a few minutes just after midnight Monday, Carlos Menem lived a moment of political glory, staged with all the theatricality and panache for which Argentines are famous.

“With force and with faith, and with conviction in the memory of Peron and Evita, we have once again triumphed,” said Menem, with his wife, Cecilia Bolocco -- Miss Universe 1987 -- at his side. “And on May 18, we will continue to triumph.”

Despite the throngs at the hotel, a victory for Menem in the May 18 runoff isn’t certain. Many observers say Menem’s first place in Sunday’s vote could be the last hurrah for a leader who has dominated and loomed over Argentina’s political life for 15 years.

Menem won Sunday’s election with 24.3% of the vote, just 2.4% ahead of his rival in the second round, Nestor Kirchner. It was a disappointing result for a leader who even late Sunday was predicting he would win “by at least eight or 10 points.”

“Carlos Menem achieved far from the performance he expected,” said analyst Eduardo van der Kooy of the newspaper Clarin. “Perhaps because he made the mistake of anchoring his campaign completely in the past.”

Reviled by many as a corrupt ghost haunting their democracy, and lionized by others as a nostalgic symbol of Argentine prosperity, Menem has polarized the electorate like no leader since Peron.

Pollster Roberto Bacman said 65% of the electorate has a negative image of Menem and would “never” vote for him -- down from 85% a year ago, when he had just been released from house arrest on corruption charges. Before Sunday’s vote, pollsters taking soundings on a potential runoff between Kirchner and Menem had the governor of Santa Cruz province leading the former president by 20 percentage points or more.

Menem has promised a return to the boom years of his two presidential terms, a period of rapid economic growth that ended with Argentina deeper in debt than ever before. In an exit poll by the Center for the Study of Public Opinion, 39% of Menem’s supporters said they voted for him because he represented “a return to the 1990s, when we lived better.”

Many Argentines who voted for Menem would likely agree with a comment made by soccer legend Diego Armando Maradona. “Menem is the one who made this mess,” Maradona said in a television interview from Cuba, where he is receiving treatment for drug addiction. “And he’s the only one who can fix it.”

On the stump, the Menem of 2003 is not especially charismatic. He’s lost the sideburns and the swagger of the early 1990s, when he was often photographed in various virile poses -- in a race car, for example, or in a fighter jet.

Now, he sometimes summons aides to help him rise to the podium. He gives few interviews and rarely steps before a crowd if it isn’t made up of his most fervent supporters.

On the eve of the election, the magazine Caras -- the Argentine equivalent of People -- placed Menem on the cover holding two baby booties. He had revealed a few days earlier that his wife was pregnant.

Asked by Caras what he thought of those who said the pregnancy was part of a “political strategy” to bolster his image, Menem answered: “It’s those same miserable people as always. I’m used to it.”

In Menem’s view, the “miserable people” are working on behalf of outgoing President Eduardo Duhalde. The two were once allies -- Duhalde was Menem’s first vice president -- but later had a bitter falling out. Now, Duhalde is backing Kirchner in what observers say is a desperate bid to keep Menem from power. All three are members of the Peronist party.

Menem has accused Duhalde of betraying Peronism. The former president said the inspiration for the name of his reelection campaign -- the “Front for Loyalty” -- came from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” in which the Roman emperor is stabbed by a once loyal follower.

In Shakespeare’s plays, however, the murdered leaders never return to take power. Instead, they come back as ghosts, haunting the thoughts of the living. For a number of Argentines, that is precisely what Menem is: the specter of scandals past.

Felix Luna, an Argentine historian, said he would not vote for Menem because, “I don’t want to return to the frivolity, corruption and law-breaking that reigned in his last administration.”

In 1991, then-U.S. Ambassador Terence Todman accused paid presidential advisor Emir Yoma, the brother of Menem’s first wife, with soliciting a bribe from a U.S. company. Another former in-law, presidential secretary Amira Yoma, was charged by a Spanish judge with drug trafficking and money laundering.

Menem remains under investigation here on charges of “illegal enrichment” as president and lying about a Swiss bank account. He is also alleged to have received a bribe from Iran to cover up a terrorist bombing here.

Before Sunday’s vote, the magazine Ventitres filled its pages with the voices of dozens of Argentine intellectuals and artists, all saying why they would never vote for Menem. “Voting for Menem is like voting for the apocalypse,” said novelist Federico Andahazi. “I would only recommend it to the suicidal.”