The internal conflict within Peronism remains heated, and it seems it will continue for some time. Former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner reappeared this Friday with a letter addressed to her supporters, in which she blamed Governor Axel Kicillof for the electoral defeat and described the decision to split the Buenos Aires elections as a "political mistake."
The text, titled "October 26 Election," was released from her apartment at San José 1111—where she is serving a sentence for corruption cases—and contains an extensive attempt at political, economic, and judicial analysis of the electoral result. Clearly too late for them, since it failed to prevent Milei from winning the national elections by more than 11 points.
"The exception of what happened in Buenos Aires Province is due to a political mistake in choosing the electoral strategy, deciding to split the elections," wrote the former president, pointing directly at Axel Kicillof.
According to her interpretation, moving the provincial elections forward acted as an "early runoff," which allowed the anti-Peronist vote to regroup and influenced the result on October 26. This reading avoids acknowledging a host of other factors that affected the province, such as, for example, the use of the Single Paper Ballot (BUP), which enabled transparent elections free from the pressure of mayors.
In her letter, Cristina warned that moving the elections forward in the province "was very risky due to its symbolic and electoral weight," since a defeat in that territory could have a "devastating effect" for Peronism at the national level. In this regard, she was not mistaken, because without a doubt the movement is completely weakened, but this is more due to the lack of popular vote than to the splitting of the elections she points to.
