Sunday night left long faces in a good part of national radicalism. Far from the political hurricane that caused the victory of Javier MileyTogether for Change (JxC) settled its presidential candidacy in the hands of two PRO leaders –Patricia Bullrich y Horacio Rodriguez Larreta-, escorted by two leaders of the senior partner of the yellow party, the UCR: louis petri y Gerardo Morales, respectively. The triumph of the mother of the hawks brought with it a pile of defeats of radical referents with a certain projection and a clear winner: Maximilian Abbot.
The head of the Buenos Aires UCR made the leap into national politics in the negotiations for this year’s candidacies, in which he was tempted by all sectors of the opposition coalition, even with Bullrich’s proposal to be his running mate . With that option dropped, the twists and turns, however, left him with a candidacy that with Monday’s newspaper ends up being almost unbeatable for him: number one on the ballot of candidates for the nation’s Senate. With the consummate triumph of bullrichism, Abad secured a seat in Congress, hopefully very different from the one he ran for other leaders of weight in radicalism.
Morales, Martin Lousteau y Gustavo Posse, standing on the side of Larreta in the JxC crack, fell out of favor in the drag of the defeat of the Buenos Aires head of government. The governor of Jujuy, who will leave his province this year, will return to the plain. The same will happen with Posse, who opted to leave the mayor of San Isidro -in the hands of his daughter Macarena, who also lost her internship- and jump to the formula for the governorship together with Diego Santilli and fell at the hands of Nestor Grindetti, the rival contender. And Lousteau, who sided with Larreta to succeed him as head of Government and had the help of the competition system arranged by the mayor, lost to Jorge Macri in the PASO and must settle for continuing in the Senate, where he has a mandate until 2025.
Another radical loser was Facundo Manes, of great election in 2021 in Buenos Aires, but who diluted his presence in recent times and tried an attempt to run for president who died before being born, no longer with internal support. After that, in the final week prior to the Open, Simultaneous and Mandatory Primaries (PASO), he showed his support for Larreta’s candidacy, without providing him with structure or flow of votes. The weight of Larretista’s fall gave the neuroscientist another slap in the face on his wandering path.
the strategist
Abad, meanwhile, led his mayor troop to victory, some 22 community leaders from Buenos Aires who supported him in the party election last year in which he faced Posse to stay with the leadership of the Buenos Aires Committee of the UCR, and who they drew votes from the interior of Buenos Aires to the space hawk. Even the president of the Forum of mayors of the UCR who responds to him is the mayor of Trenque Lauquen, Miguel Fernandezwho enlisted as Grindetti’s running mate to run for the Buenos Aires governorship.
In addition, the abbey strategy did not err in its small payment, Mar del Plata, nor in the Buenos Aires sectionals. In La Feliz the mayor won Guillermo Montenegro, who is running for re-election and maintains an unparalleled strategic alliance in JvC: PRO and UCR co-govern the district head city, with leaders always attentive to Abad’s gaze and with white beret representatives who are not the caboose of the yellows, but rather they have voice and vote, representation in the municipal cabinet and provincial shipowners. In fact, it was one of the two municipalities in Buenos Aires that the party allowed to go with the system called “V”, in which the face of the mayor was glued to the two ballots that were competing for candidacies in JvC.
At the provincial level, Abad was for radicalism the kingmaker of the party strategy within JxC in Buenos Aires. Although he had already been one of the sectional setters in 2015 and 2019, his influence on all the sectional lists was key: they won the lists of aspiring legislators that Bullrich sponsored and that Abad set up with leaders who answer directly to him. He scored wins in the Fourth, with Valentin Miranda; Fifth, with Diego Garcia; Sixth, with Nerina Neumann; and seventh, with Alejandra Lorden.
While the purple leadership avoids referring to the concrete possibility that it had of putting its own candidacies to play in this electoral turn, to go after the PRO again, Abad chose to negotiate the spaces in silence, faithful to his style, with a strong commitment that, at moment, it was much more favorable to him than to the rest of the radical leadership.
