AT FIRST glance, the headlines after the mid-term election on October 27th were confusing. Tiempo, a newspaper that supports President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, boasted that her branch of Peronism, called the Front for Victory (FPV) had “consolidated its majority”. La Nación, which is critical of the president, insisted that her party was clobbered and that the result augured a new political era.On paper, Tiempo was right. With 33% of the vote for the lower house of Congress, the FPV remains the largest single political force. It narrowly retained a majority in both houses; its seat-count barely fluctuated. But those numbers hide a significant political change. The seats the party was defending were the hard core it had kept in 2009, when Ms Fernández’s popularity plunged temporarily because of the world recession and her fight with farmers over export taxes. Overall, its vote plummeted by about 20 percentage points compared with the 2011 general election, when the president cruised to a second term. The best that could be said for the latest result was that the FPV’s national reach (...
via The Economist: The Americas http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21588856-defeat-where-it-mattered-leaves-president-diminishedand-makes-sergio-massa-pictured?fsrc=rss|ame
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