Conservative opposition candidate Mauricio Macri comfortably won Argentina’s
presidential election on Sunday after promising business-friendly reforms to
spur investment in the struggling economy.
Mr. Macri’s supporters swarmed to the Obelisk in the heart of Buenos Aires’
theatre district for a giant street party as subdued ruling party candidate
Daniel Scioli conceded defeat.
Argentina’s election body said Mr. Macri had 53 per cent of votes and Mr.
Scioli had 47 per cent with returns in from three-quarters of polling stations.
Three exit polls also pointed toward a Macri victory.
“This feels like a dream,” said 43-year-old doctor Angela Torres at Mr.
Macri’s headquarters, which pulsed with Latin music and was festooned with white
and sky-blue balloons, the colours of the Argentine flag. “A new Argentina is on
its way that will be better in every sense.”
In a sign of Argentines’ weariness with a spluttering economy, rising crime
and corruption, Mr. Macri had gone into the run-off election with a comfortable
lead in opinion polls over Mr. Scioli, candidate of outgoing President Cristina
Fernandez’s party.
Mr. Scioli’s campaign team said they would wait to see official results
before making any statements about the election. But a source at the election
body said the result trend was irreversible at this point of vote counting.
During the campaign Mr. Scioli warned that Mr. Macri’s orthodox policies are
similar to those that preceded Argentina’s 2002 economic crisis, which tossed
millions of people into poverty.
Mr. Macri promises to set Latin America’s third biggest economy on a more
free-market course after a combined 12 years of leftist populism under Ms.
Fernandez and her late husband and predecessor Nestor Kirchner.
Barred from seeking a third straight term, Ms. Fernandez will leave office
with Argentina deeply divided between those who back her protectionist policies
and defence of worker rights and others who blame her policies for weak economic
growth.
A moderate within the Peronist movement, Mr. Scioli appears to have failed to
win over middle-ground voters after struggling to step out of Ms. Fernandez’s
shadow during the election campaign.
His talk of maintaining generous social welfare programs and energy subsidies
while making only gradual changes to the capital and trade controls that have
hobbled the economy hurt his credentials as a candidate for change.
“Scioli did not manage to differentiate himself from Fernandez and so people
stopped seeing him as a change of style and went over to Macri,” said political
analyst Mariel Fornoni.
The shift in power in Argentina may reverberate across South America where
other left-leaning governments, such as Venezuela and Brazil, are also up
against the end of a decade-long commodities boom and allegations of financial
mismanagement.
Mr. Scioli’s apparent defeat amounted to an indictment of Ms. Fernandez’s
stewardship of the economy and her confrontational style. She often took to the
airwaves to mock her critics with fiery speeches and denounced holdout creditors
suing the country over defaulted debt as “vultures.” and invokes the memory of
her late husband as the guiding light of her policies.
Ms. Fernandez is known as a political fighter committed to her vision of a
government actively involved in helping low-income families, and she may return
as a presidential candidate in 2019.
She appeared on television in recent weeks appealing to voters to ensure that
government funding of education, healthcare and programs for poor mothers
remains.