ANALYSIS: Argentine government crashes in midterm election

Buenos Aires - Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, her husband the former president, and basically anyone who has actively backed her government of late just came crashing in the weekend's crucial midterm legislative election. A defeat had been widely expected. But what actually happened was well beyond opinion poll predictions, well beyond the government's worst nightmares. The collapse - which brought the ruling party's national vote percentage down from 45 per cent in the 2007 presidential election to yesterday's meager 30 per cent - was huge, and it was complete: everything that could go wrong just did, everything that could be lost was indeed lost. In more concrete terms, the Argentine government lost its majority in both chambers of Congress, it came crashing - or obtained Pyrhhic victories - in its traditional strongholds, and it lost its capacity to lead the ruling party as a politically-useful compact unit. And just in case anyone was thinking of a comeback, electoral defeat made the few leaders that were still standing by an embattled government politically worthless. 'Kirchnerism is over as a political cycle,' political analyst Joaquin Morales Sola observed Monday in the conservative daily La Nacion. Why did this happen? Because Fernandez de Kirchner - who almost doubled the percentage of votes of her closest rival for the presidency less than two years ago - has spent the strong legacy that she got from her husband and predecessor Nestor Kirchner (2003-2007), who is also to blame as her closest advisor. In the words of analyst Eduardo van der Kooy, there was 'a countless list of mistakes that ended in a collapse.' One element of course stands out among that list of mistakes: last year's government effort to push through a law to increase export tariffs on soy and other farm produce, making the tax rate rise with the price of the commodities in the world markets. The move triggered a lengthy farmers' strike that caused price hikes and food shortages in urban centres including Buenos Aires, and it set in motion a political process that crystallized Sunday. Leftist political commentator Horacio Verbitsky on Monday paraphrased Bill Clinton's famous 1992 campaign slogan to explain Sunday's defeat: 'It's farming, stupid.' The political consequences of the government's evident miscalculation had been apparent for months. First, the strike became a unifying factor for the weak, dispersed opposition to the Kirchners. Second, the government gave in to demands that the tariff increase be approved by Congress, only to see its own majority crumble as farming constituencies called their representatives to order. Eventually, the government proposal was dramatically defeated in the Senate, with the decisive vote coming from Fernandez de Kirchner's own Vice President Julio Cobos. And the election on Sunday just confirmed all this and more: the presidential couple is politically-dead, and they are a huge liability for whatever allies they still have. Observers had seen Sunday's vote as setting the stage for the 2011 presidential election. Now the country stands before a strange inter-regnum phase, without undisputed candidates for either the ruling party or the opposition. The challenge is to avoid a power vacuum, and it is likely that all parties will want to avoid it in severely crisis-prone Argentina. The Kirchners are centre-left populists who fit in the Peronist movement, named for the historic Argentine leader Juan Peron who was elected president three times until he died in office in 1974. But the Peronist movement is ideologically diverse, and the more conservative elements within it - with former Formula 1 driver Carlos Reutemann emerging as a possible leader - are among Sunday's winners. As it has traditionally done, Peronism is likely to re-align automatically, gravitating towards its strongest candidate. And that means away from the government. In the province of Buenos Aires, the traditional stronghold of Peronism and also a decisive constituency since it holds almost 40 per cent of the national electorate, the government fielded Nestor Kirchner as its top candidate for Congress in an effort to brace its position. But Kirchner lost to conservative Peronist Francisco de Narvaez, a wealthy businessman who led a coalition of dissident Peronists and Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri, another presidential hopeful. Argentina is a long way from its famous crisis of the beginning of the decade, which saw Fernando de la Rua resign and leave the presidential palace in central Buenos Aires in a helicopter amid widespread streets protests and riots. But Sunday's vote left it with lame-duck president, and with power up for grabs two years ahead of presidential elections.