First couple’s dynasty on line in Argentina vote

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Argentina’s first couple fought for its survival Sunday in congressional elections that could undermine the president’s power and seal the fate of one of the country’s biggest political dynasties.

Allies of President Cristina Fernandez and her husband and predecessor Nestor Kirchner have controlled the Congress for six years, but analysts expected them to lose two dozen seats in both chambers, eroding their absolute majorities and damaging their brand as their Peronist party seeks direction ahead of 2011’s presidential race.

Kirchner, who has led the party since his wife succeeded him as president in 2007, is seeking a congressional seat in Buenos Aires province, where more than a third of Argentine voters live. He has cast the race as a referendum on his wife’s tenure and is thought to see the office as a launching pad for his own return to the presidency.

Queues crowded sidewalks and yards outside polling stations on Sunday afternoon, as swine flu concerns prompted the nation’s Health Minister to require waiting voters to stand a meter (yard) apart in the frigid air. Now in the middle of winter, Argentina has confirmed 1,294 cases of swine flu and 17 deaths, and poll workers wore surgical masks as a precaution.

Cameras mobbed Kirchner as he voted midmorning at a high school in the capital suburb that is home to the presidential residence. Fernandez voted 1,700 miles (2,800 kilometers) away in her home city of Rio Gallegos.

“Argentina is at a decisive moment to continue the country’s transformation,” Kirchner said. “I’m living this civic day like a good democrat, as all Argentines are.”

Recent polls have shown Kirchner in a near dead-heat with dissident Peronist Francisco Narvaez, a charismatic millionaire and sitting congressman who forms part of an anti-Fernandez Peronist faction that has been growing in the legislature.

Buenos Aires province Gov. Daniel Scioli defended the Kirchners’ platform and urged voters to do the same. “We have to keep advancing based on the results already achieved,” he said.

Yet even if their block holds its own, a Kirchner loss would weaken Fernandez’s government, diluting her authority and kicking off a power struggle within party ranks, Eurasia Group Latin America analyst Daniel Kerner wrote in a research note last week.

Half the country’s 256-member Chamber of Deputies and one third of the 72-member Senate is up for vote. Preliminary results are expected by 9:30 p.m. local time (8:30 p.m. EDT; 0030 GMT).

Exit polls reported by Argentine television predicted significant losses for the first couple, including in key districts such as the city of Buenos Aires and Cordoba and Santa Fe provinces.

“With these results … the ruling party would lose control of the Chamber of Deputies, and the Senate is also at risk,” analyst Rosendo Fraga told news channel Todo Noticias.

While supporters once praised Fernandez and her husband for slashing unemployment with public works programs that jump-started Argentina’s battered economy, opponents and analysts now cast the couple as authoritarian and unwilling to compromise.

“Their overall nature is too much intervention,” Goldman Sachs senior Latin America economist Alberto Ramos said. “It’s not going to put Argentina on a crash course, but it is a story about growing inefficiencies and increasingly autocratic management.”

The Kirchners’ problems have also “gone beyond substance to style,” Ramos added. “They’re very confrontational and stubborn: It’s all or nothing, and they’d prefer to break rather than bend. People have gotten disenchanted with that.”

Fernandez’s approval ratings tumbled to 29 percent this year after a four-month standoff over export taxes with Argentina’s powerful farm sector. She has extended price caps, nationalized $23 billion in pensions and taken over the country’s biggest airline in a bid to boost the state’s role in the economy.

“I’d like the government to be somewhat weakened by this election,” said Alejandro Siniscalco, 41, after casting his ballot in the middle-class Buenos Aires neighborhood of Caballito. “Many things aren’t being done well, and we need to put a brake on the government in congress.”

The government moved up Sunday’s vote, originally set for October, in a step that critics said was meant to poll voters before the global economic crisis took a bigger toll on Argentina. Growth fell to 2 percent in the first quarter, its slowest since the economy collapsed in 2002, and annual inflation officially dipped to 5.5 percent in May — although most independent economists believe the actual figure tops 15 percent.

Yet Kirchner has argued that a win for his coalition is necessary to protect the economy, reminding voters of his success in bringing the country back from collapse during his 2003-2007 administration.

“We have to stand by this model; it’s us or chaos,” he said at a May 30 rally.

Despite the implications for the first couple’s political future, analysts agreed that the results of Sunday’s vote are unlikely to change the president’s policies. Fernandez retains decree powers, and is unlikely to back off her convictions, Kerner and Ramos noted.

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Associated Press writer Mayra Pertossi in Buenos Aires contributed to this report.