Socialist Action /December 2001
Left Makes Gains in Argentine Elections
October's mid-term elections in Argentina marked a significant turn
in one of the deepest crises the country has ever faced. After more than
three years of recession, savage cuts in wages and public services, a growing
wave of increasingly militant social struggles, and with the prospect of
total financial meltdown lurking just around the corner, everyone expected
the ruling Alliance parties to take a beating at the polls.
What wasn't expected-in a country where voting is compulsory-was the
huge number of people who refused to cast a positive vote at all. Even more
surprising, alongside this "angry vote" (voto bronca), was the
spectacular increase in the scores of several currents on the socialist
left.
The British socialist newspaper Socialist Outlook asked Ernesto Herrera,
leader of the Fourth International's work in Latin America and a member
of the International Commission of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) in Uruguay,
to comment.
Ernesto Herrera: "The so-called "voto bronca" or spoiled
votes, which reached about 30 percent. show that a large part of the population
is fed up with and no longer believes in the whole political system.
In these elections the governing Alliance lost 5 million votes. The Peronists
lost votes too, even if they won more than the Alliance.
The progress of the left, on the other hand, is the first sign of a real
change in popular awareness. The left began to channel the dissatisfaction
of the workers, the unemployed, the students, and the impoverished sections
of the middle class.
In total the left won 1.3 million votes, which is very significant. At
a national level that represents almost 12 percent of the vote. Within that,
Autonomy and Freedom, led by the former Trotskyist MP Luis Zamora, with
positions opposed to corruption and to payment of the foreign debt, but
with no very clear program, capitalized on much of the discontent.
The United Left (IU), which is an alliance between the Communist Party
and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Movement (MST), also made gains, as
did the PO and the MAS, two other Trotskyist currents, and the Humanist
Party, which got more than 300,000 votes. In Buenos Aires these parties
of the left won four or five members of parliament. In some other provinces
they did the same.
The problem is that these 1.3 million votes don't translate into a unified
proposal from the left. They are the sum of different projects, currents,
organizations, which don't even have an agreement for joint work in parliament
or in the town halls.
At the moment there's no sign of a political agreement between the different
currents to work together, either inside or outside parliament.
What's more the biggest left vote went to Zamora's Autonomy and Freedom,
which expresses somewhat "anti-party" positions, not only against
the parties of the right, but against the forms of organization and engaging
in politics adopted by the radical, Marxist left.
Socialist Action /December 2001 |