Misiones Elections 2023: The Victory of Frente Renovador de la Concordia and the Provincialization of Politics

The victory of the “Frente Renovador de la Concordia” (Renewal Front of Concord) stopped Misiones over the rift.

The election plebiscized the local management of the Misiones force with almost 70% of the votes and turned its back on the forces representing the national rift, which had very low results, even on the verge of being testimonial.

The Frente Renovador de la Concordia (FRC) won again by an overwhelming majority in the elections for the provincial authorities. The first official numbers assigned it more than 70% of the votes, a figure that will decrease slightly with the final count and that will maintain a significant difference with the rest.

The result is, however, a sign of the times. The FRC has been in power since 2003, although its founder, Carlos Rovira, first became governor in 1999. Twenty years later, and in spite of the wear and tear of the administration and the ups and downs of national politics, his political project is supported by almost three out of four missionaries.

This Sunday, Hugo Passalacqua won with a wide advantage, who became the elected governor for the next four years. The referent of the Frente Renovador de la Concordia thanked the citizenship and although he clarified that he respects “the people of Buenos Aires”, he pointed out that he does not want “someone calling from the Federal Capital to say what has to be done”. “We are in a period of neo renovation, but I am going to say what I think: renovation was always neo. Now it is in the vocabulary, because there is a work towards a new spirit, visions, energies, perspectives, and that for a young province is fabulous”, he pointed out.

On the other side of the inclined scale were the forces that society identifies with the rift. Together for Change improved some points its 2019 performance. Humberto Schiavoni, of the PRO, had obtained 17% and the radical Martín Arjol will finally climb to just over 25%. The two parties of Kirchnerism, Frente La Fuerza Somos Todos and Frente Amplio will barely add 5 or 6 points in total.

Arjol quickly acknowledged the defeat but pointed out that the result “for our space was positive” since “we got three deputies, we doubled the volume of votes of the last election”. “In general terms, there is a growth in our political space”, he celebrated in dialogue with El Territorio.

Political scientist Mario Riorda, when analyzing what happened after the 2021 legislative elections, anticipated the provincialization of politics as an escape route for the officialisms of each province to avoid defeats.

The phenomenon is, perhaps, more profound.

In the absence or failure of the last two national models, in Misiones a provincial project was developed, almost autonomous, with a historical basis in the artiguista model and the figure of Andrés Guacurí and a future projection with the knowledge economy as its north.

With nuances, this scheme is beginning to be repeated in other districts: Neuquén, Río Negro, Santiago del Estero, Salta and the nominally justicialist governments of the provinces of the Central Region (Córdoba, Santa Fe and Entre Ríos) not aligned with any national scheme are added.

Under the spotlight
The vote in Misiones left many defeated but no winner at the national level. Contrary to what Napoleon Bonaparte’s sentence says, in this case the orphan is the victory.

Neither the Casa Rosada nor the Instituto Patria will want to see the few porotos that the candidates who claim to be K. Juntos por el Cambio put in the field all the weight of its national Panzers with the arrival of Patricia Bullrich; Horacio Rodríguez Larreta; Gerardo Morales; Gustavo Valdés and even María Eugenia Vidal. But the needle barely moved with respect to 2019, when Cambiemos had already entered a steep decline.

The most beaten of all Juntos referents is, perhaps, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta. His man in Misiones, Alfredo Schiavoni, played strongly in favor of Arjol and was a visible figure in the campaign, unlike his brother Humberto, member of Patricia Bullrich’s small table, who kept a lower profile. In addition, Natalia Dörper, the vice candidate, is a larretista.

The vote also deepened the opposition decline in Posadas, where 30 percent of the electoral roll votes. A symptom of this is that after 9 p.m. and shortly after the first official numbers were known, the Casa Radical, the bunker of Juntos, was left in darkness due to a power cut.

With the numbers in hand, Rovira made a move thinking about the upcoming national elections. In full euphoria, he took his candidates for national legislators to the stage.

Behind the first row of chairs where he was; Governor Oscar Herrera Ahuad; the winning ticket Hugo Passalacqua and Lucas Romero and the reelected Mayor of Posadas, Leonardo Stelatto stood Daniel Vancsik and Yamila Ruiz, FRC candidates for the Chamber of Deputies of the Nation and Carlos Arce and Sonia Rojas Decut, registered to fight for the seats in the Senate.

The signal was clear. In the last national elections, the Renewal went with a short ballot, without sticking to any presidential candidacy. It paid a cost for that. Now it is redoubling the bet, although there is a plan B that nobody dares to mention out loud: the possibility that there may be an agreement that may lead to a sticking together. The Frente Renovador grew in the heat of the first Kirchnerism, although it later took other paths.