Vote for someone

Political season is upon us. The candidates’ ads are all over town, pasted on walls, on billboard trucks, on signs placed on carts trailing behind bicycles. And of course TV ads. The next president is likely to be Cristina Kirchener, the wife of the current President, Nestor Kirchener. What a backward country, right? Who would elect the family member of another president? Oh, right. Really, I can’t say that the democratic process is any better or worse than back home. Here they have 100% turnout for the elections because they take place on a Sunday and participation is obligatory. So everyone HAS TO vote for someone. Most people are so sick of their presidents running away with all their tax money, and the current president doesn’t seem to have screwed things up too badly since taking office soon after the economic crisis of 2001. He can’t run again, but his missus can. People tell me that often when a new government, federal or local, takes over, many projects of the outgoing administration are abandoned in favor of new ones. This has resulted in halfway built highways. Speaking of highways, there seem to be quite a few long-term construction projects being finished just weeks before the election, so parties can point to things they’ve accomplished. Or maybe it’s a coincidence that both the new overpass and the rebricking of Avenida San Martin were finished the same week. I’ve heard that the days of directly buying votes are not over here either. I was told of one brilliant plan from I-don’t-know-when, in which a candidate gave a pair of shoes to each voter in some town. He distributed the right shoe before the election with the promise of the left shoe upon winning. Most of the ads I see on TV don’t say much about any issues other than reducing crime. They mostly just say that, “candidate X supports the president’s plan. Vote for Nestor, Cristina and Candidate X and we all win.” The politics here are as complicated as anywhere, with all the influences an elected leader needs to appease. I’m not a political analyst, just a gringo who watches TV.