ARGENTINA:PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN: front-runner gets up close and personal Argentina's government is throwing state resources behind its candidate - the president's wife, writes Tom Hennigan
At first glance Argentina's democracy looks healthy. Just days ahead of Sunday's vote the faces of many of the 17 candidates smile down from hoardings and posters across the country. There are rallies and policy launches. Ad breaks on television sell voters various promises while the late night round-table discussions see candidates and their running mates debate the issues.
But a closer look reveals a less rosy picture. Absent is anything resembling a level playing field as the government is blatantly throwing the resources of the state behind its candidate - who just happens to be the wife of the sitting president.
President Néstor Kirchner has been busy in recent weeks timing populist government announcements to coincide with the climax of the campaign of Cristina Fernández Kirchner, the first lady and senator seeking to become Argentina's first elected woman president.
Just last week he forced local banks into dropping interest rates on small personal loans. His administration has unleashed a flood of government adverts lauding its achievements during the last four years to coincide with the presidential race. Kirchner has also authorised spending millions of public pesos on flying his wife around the world for photo opportunities with various foreign dignitaries in order to boost her profile as a stateswoman. Public television is giving her privileged treatment, according to one local monitoring organisation.
Aside from these public resources, Cristina Fernández Kirchner's campaign team is also massively outspending her opponents in buying up air time without revealing exactly where all the money is coming from. Though few doubt that she will win comfortably, opinion polls are widely distrusted as most of the big pollsters work for the government.
The result has been that she has dominated the campaign without really fully engaging in it. She has denied all media requests for interviews and refused to debate with any of the other candidates. Instead, she has restricted herself to speeches at campaign rallies where she sounds more like a president-elect than a candidate hunting for votes. Despite 39 per cent of voters saying that crime and insecurity are their main concern, she has not mentioned the subject once during her whole campaign.
In part she can afford to do so because the opposition she faces is so fragmented and therefore easy to ignore.
The economic crash of 2001 broke Argentina's traditional ruling parties. While the Kirchners have been able to build a new ruling alliance from office, the opposition has struggled to put together an alternative outside of it. This task has been made hugely more difficult because of two strokes of luck from which the Kirchners have benefited since coming to power in 2003.
One is the huge boom in commodity prices in recent years driven by Chinese demand. The other is their political inheritance on taking power in 2003.
At the depths of the crisis in 2002 the congress voted to grant the presidency so-called "superpowers" to try to contain the problems. Néstor Kirchner inherited these powers and has shown no interest in surrendering them even though the crisis has abated.
They give him massive discretionary control over a huge slice of public spending which he does not have to account to congress for. The powers are doubly enhanced as the president inherited them just as the global boom in commodities ensured Argentina saw billions of dollars flooding into the country thanks mainly to soya exports.
The government used export taxes to take a large slice of this bonanza, which meant its coffers were full for the first time in decades just as the president had been granted more power than ever before over how to spend the money.
And it has been spent in building presidential power. Historically, power in Argentina has see-sawed between the federal government and the provinces as much as it ever did between Peronists and Radicals or between civilians and the military.
With the state coffers full and the promiscuous use of his new powers, the president has tilted this relationship massively in the presidency's favour.
This has allowed him to build the kind of national alliance necessary to rule in Argentina, even despite deep splits in his own ruling Peronist party. It has also allowed him to undermine opponents by using the promise of funds and jobs, or the threat to withhold them, to peel off elements of the opposition and add them to his coalition. All these elements are now being set to work for his wife, making her the overwhelming favourite to win on Sunday.
But the government's stage managing of the campaign is leading to widespread apathy. Six out of 10 voters say they are paying no attention to it. Evita's second coming it is not.
The question is whether this new political landscape constitutes a permanent retreat for democracy in the face of a turbo-charged presidency. Looming problems in the economy - spiralling inflation, energy shortages, a lack of capital investment just as production reaches capacity - suggest not. After five years of boom the Kirchner regime might be in for bumpier economic times ahead with a subsequent price to be paid politically.
"Argentina's presidency is procyclical. When the economy is going well it is very strong," says local political analyst Sergio Berensztein. "But with recession its capacity to influence events weakens and things like corruption scandals start to have more impact. Then you see the opposition able to influence politics more.
"In Argentina the name of the political game has always been instability. Are the Kirchners going to change that? I don't think so."