After almost a year adrift since President Javier Milei took office, Peronism is close to having a new leader. The movement’s largest party, the Partido Justicialista (PJ), will have party elections in November. The catch? There may be just one candidate: former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

La Rioja Governor Ricardo Quintela insisted on running against Kirchner, undoubtedly Peronism’s most important leader in the past 15 years, in what would be the party’s first competitive internal elections. But now, members could face a choice between Kirchner and a blank vote after the party’s electoral board rejected Quintela’s candidacy on Sunday.

The board said that Quintela and his “Federales” ticket had failed to gather signatures from the 2% of party members needed to back his candidacy. They added that there were irregularities with the signatures he did present. On Saturday, the board had given Quintela 24 hours to present the remaining signatures.

Quintela’s lawyers rejected the decision on Saturday, arguing that it was an attempt to block the governor’s candidacy. In a formal complaint, they said they had presented the necessary documents a week earlier. They also accused the party of failing to take adequate care of the paper tallies with the signatures, claiming that over 200 of them — including 3,585 signatures — have gone missing.

Now, Quintela could take the matter to the judiciary. Unless a court finds in his favor, Kirchner will be the only candidate running for the November 17 party election. “You won’t be able to seize Peronism,” he said in a communiqué on Friday, after the accusations of irregular and missing signatures surfaced.

Who is Quintela?

Quintela is an old-school Peronist leader. He started his activism within the party in the 1980s. In 1983 he became the party’s sports secretary and climbed up the ladder within both the PJ and the historically Peronist La Rioja provincial government.

He became a local lawmaker, and from there, a national deputy, serving as mayor of La Rioja city from 2003-2015. In 2019, he became governor of the province.

Quintela leapt into the national political spotlight in recent weeks, when he started traveling the country to raise his profile and drum up support ahead of his PJ leadership bid. He’s not interested in a shot at Argentina’s presidency “for now,” he has said.

“Peronism is a sleeping giant, we need to put it back on its feet and start moving towards its endgame: achieving the happiness of the people,” he said in a recent interview with CNN Argentina radio. He highlighted the importance of candidates from outside Greater Buenos Aires to have a shot at leading the party — a point of federalist tension in a highly centralized country. 

Although Kirchner could now be the only candidate for the party’s presidency, the internal dispute with Quintela reflects a lack of leadership within PJ, said political analyst Lara Goyburu.

The party’s disputes, which have been going on since at least 2021, revolve around tensions between “a more metropolitan Peronism associated with the progressive left and La Cámpora,” a Kirchnerist youth group led by Cristina’s son, Máximo Kirchner, “and a more traditional, provincial Peronism of the governors of North Western Argentina and North Eastern Argentina, who feel that the progressive agenda has reduced their social bases,” Goyburu said. The latter group includes Quintela.

Argentina will have legislative elections in 2025, mid-way through Milei’s term. The PJ elections are key for Peronism because the party’s president will have the power to choose the opposition candidates for that election, Goyburu pointed out.

Peronism, however, has been struggling to find a strategy in its role as the opposition to Milei. “Kirchner wasn’t convinced about having internal elections, members of the party convinced her because there’s no other leadership,” Goyburu said. “The PJ’s main problem is that there are no new leaders. They are fighting for the party’s leadership, as if they had to solve that first in order to give answers to a society that is calling for solutions.”

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