Confirmed: Wado de Pedro is the Kirchnerists' presidential candidate in the primaries

ARGENTINA - In Brief 22 Jun 2023 by Esteban Fernández Medrano

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Eduardo Enrique (aka Wado) de Pedro (WdP), current Minister of Interior and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner´s (CFK) political dauphin will run as a presidential candidate for the newly renamed “Unión por la Patria” (UP – formerly FdT). In August´s primaries, he will face the other main candidate of the Pan-Peronism, Daniel Scioli. WdP’s running mate will be the Peronist Governor of Tucuman and former Chief of Cabinet Juan Manzur. He is a politician who, after the government´s adverse midterm elections, emerged as the head of a group of Peronist governors who politically supported Alberto Fernández. At that moment they provided some political weight to a diminishing President, basically to avoid AF's being engulfed by the angry Kirchnerists. Now, Manzur switched sides and accompanies the Kirchnerist tandem, against the Peronist candidate Daniel Scioli, who is openly supported by AF. That's politics... WdP´s announcement also puts an end to the debate about whether Economy Minister Sergio Massa would/could participate in the presidential race. As we said before, having WdP as a candidate opens the possibility, from a market perspective, that a riskier electoral option could win, i.e., one that continues current economic policies. Although we assumed that SM would not run, it is unclear how much of this higher-risk scenario has already been discounted by the markets. Also, the question that remains open is how SM will react to the fact that he has not been chosen as the presidential candidate. Our base case scenario is that he will continue as Economic Minister, but we will have to confirm this in the coming days. Massa´s main problem has been that his economic achievement...