Federal judge María Servini has turned down La Rioja Governor Ricardo Quintela’s request that the Partido Justicialista (PJ) party elections be suspended. Quintela had filed the petition after the party’s electoral board rejected his candidacy on the grounds that it lacked the required backing of party members. 

Servini’s decision means that former President Cristina Kirchner’s ticket will be the only one on the ballot for the November 17 elections. It remains to be seen if the elections will be held now that there are no other candidates competing against her for party leadership. 

Last week, 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, they had given Quintela 24 hours to present the remaining signatures. 

Quintela’s lawyers rejected the decision, 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.

The judge upheld the party board’s decision, pointing to irregularities found on a number of members’ presentations backing Quintela’s candidacy. She listed instances in which national identificacion numbers were either missing or unreadable, as well as signatures allegedly made by one person that appeared to be significantly dissimilar. 

In her ruling, Servini wrote that “the plaintiff does not disprove nor contradict the reasons the National Electoral Board offered for its decision on October 25 and 27, but merely expresses his discontent with the resolution.” She added that they presented no elements that would allow them to say that the board had “favored the other ticket.”

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.