It is official, Alberto Fernández is the new president-elect

ARGENTINA - In Brief 28 Oct 2019 by Esteban Fernández Medrano

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Past midnight, with 97.1% of the voting tables accounted for and an overall participation rate of 80.9%, it is official now. Alberto Fernández (AF) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) are the new presidents-elect of Argentina. AF managed to obtain 48% of the votes (surpassing the 45% hurdle to win in the first round) while MM obtained 40.4%. Although Macri did much better in the election than in the primaries (in fact, he narrowed the lead with the Kirchnerists by almost 9pp), it was not enough to avoid AF's winning the presidency in the first round. As expected, the participation rate in the general election was significantly higher than that of the primaries, but it was not higher than in the general election in 2015, and in particular, it was lower than the elections in the 1980s. While MM manage, to a large extent, to capture those additional votes, the fact that the overall participation rate did not rise to the high 80s, was probably a key reason why MM did not mandate to reach the ballotage. The general election had 2.07mn new votes compared to the primaries, and MM gained 2.57mn new votes while AF only captured 0.72mn votes. The other presidential candidates, in particular, Roberto Lavagna, who was not very convincing during the two presidential debates, lost close to 1mn votes. Before alignments, changes and coalition reshufflings, the Kirchnerists by themselves will not have their quorum the Congress. In the Senate they will have 33 seats, compared to 31 of Juntos por el Cambio (37 are needed to have quorum), and in the Lower House they will have 116 seated (129 are needed to have quorum) compared to 115 seats of Juntos por el Cambio. In both Houses, the...