In Rebuke to Kirchner, Argentines Elect Opposition Leader Mauricio Macri as President
By SIMON ROMERO and JONATHAN GILBERTNOV

BUENOS AIRES — Argentine voters handed a victory to Mauricio Macri in the country’s presidential election on Sunday, delivering a mandate to an opposition political figure seeking to roll back some of the protectionist economic measures of the departing president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

With votes from 99 percent of polling places counted, Mr. Macri, the mayor of Buenos Aires and a former president of Boca Juniors, one of Argentina’s most popular soccer teams, was leading with 51.4 percent of the vote, according to election officials, against 48.5 percent for Daniel Scioli, a former speedboat racer and vice president under former President Néstor Kirchner, who died in 2010. Mr. Scioli conceded defeat on national television on Sunday night.

Running a largely nonconfrontational campaign in a society that has grown increasingly polarized under Mrs. Kirchner, who succeeded her husband in 2007, Mr. Macri, 56, stunned the political establishment in October by forcing the race into a runoff and maintaining his surge in recent weeks. He ran to the right of his rivals, blending plans to overhaul the economy and promote the tolerance of various points of view on social issues.

Mr. Macri’s relatively narrow victory revealed deep fissures in Argentina after 12 years of governance by Mrs. Kirchner and her husband, with many voters expressing concern over the direction of the economy and frustration with Mrs. Kirchner’s blistering attacks on critics in the news media, business establishments and rival political parties.

“Cristina divided the country and destroyed it morally,” said Dimitri Javakhishvili, 67, an immigrant from Georgia who works as a doorman at a building here in the neighborhood of Recoleta. Mr. Javakhishvili acknowledged that Mr. Macri could face challenges in trying to govern when Mrs. Kirchner’s political movement moves into the opposition.

Still, Mr. Javakhishvili said, “At least he’s something new; he’s something fresh.”

Not everyone here shares such views. Graffiti and posters have appeared across Buenos Aires demonizing Mr. Macri, outnumbering on many streets the campaign posters expressing support for Mr. Scioli, who balanced lukewarm support from Mrs. Kirchner’s loyal followers with claims that social spending could be sustained despite galloping inflation and declining private investment.

One example of anti-Macri sentiment, alluding to fears that he will govern for a privileged few, simply says “Macrisis.”

Mr. Macri, the scion of a wealthy family, has tried to combat perceptions that he would reverse the government’s leftist policies, saying he will keep the nationalized companies like Aerolíneas Argentinas and YPF, Argentina’s largest oil company, under state control. His economic advisers have also sought to tamp down fears around contentious economic issues like a potential currency devaluation.

In addition to grappling with inflation and currency controls aimed at curbing capital flight, Mr. Macri will now face the challenge of governing with much of his opposition under the sway of Peronism, the ideologically diverse political grouping that has dominated Argentine politics for decades.

Yet while Mrs. Kirchner’s leftist faction has emerged as a dominant group within Peronism, with the president herself signaling that she planned to remain politically active after stepping down in December, Mr. Macri’s margin of victory will help him in the months ahead, analysts said.

“He will be able to start to work with authority,” said Juan Cruz Díaz, a director at the Cefeidas Group, a political risk analysis firm. But he added that Mr. Scioli’s performance still demonstrated the underlying strength of the Peronist political movement. “It’s not a devastating margin of difference,” Mr. Díaz said. “With a fatigued government and an erratic campaign, it’s a good performance. They are far from dead.”

Many political analysts in Argentina doubted that Mr. Macri would make it this far, with skepticism abounding when he began assembling his movement to the right of many rivals more than a decade ago.

He ventured into a part of Argentina’s political spectrum that had previously been associated with conservative Peronists or disgraced figures in the military establishment.

But over time, he honed his negotiating skills as the mayor of Buenos Aires, while insisting during this year’s campaign that he did not plan to roll back popular social programs introduced during the Kirchners’ presidencies, like cash subsidies for poor families and “Soccer for Everybody,” a government initiative that covers soccer broadcasting fees so people can watch matches free.

Mr. Macri seemed to gain the upper hand after mounting a door-to-door campaign that helped his supporters win important provincial and local races in October, including the prized post of the governor of Buenos Aires Province, now held by Mr. Scioli but won by María Eugenia Vidal, a top adviser to Mr. Macri and deputy mayor who focused largely on antipoverty programs in the municipal government.

Many voters have also expressed fatigue with Mrs. Kirchner’s governing style and reports of corruption among her prominent supporters.

Signaling that she may not plan to remain subdued after leaving office, Mrs. Kirchner issued a torrent of messages on Twitter on Sunday celebrating her foreign and domestic policies. One message even seemed like a warning to Mr. Macri, who has vowed to improve Argentina’s strained ties with the United States and review a contentious deal with China to build a nuclear reactor.

“The person with the responsibility of leading the homeland should know the right place of the Argentine republic in a multipolar world,” Mrs. Kirchner wrote.

Mr. Macri’s “wager wasn’t an easy one,” the Argentine writer Martín Caparrós wrote in the Spanish newspaper El País. But Mr. Macri’s ambitions were aided, Mr. Caparrós said, by “12 years of rule by a couple that spoke as if from the left but acted in their own interests.”

Some voters, however, said that their fears over the threats to the government’s antipoverty programs outweighed criticism of the Kirchners or concerns that Mr. Scioli, viewed as friendlier to the business establishment, was not as radical as they had hoped.

“I’m voting for the lesser of two evils,” said Teo Levín, 25, a medical student who explained that he was voting for Mr. Scioli with gritted teeth. “I understand that Scioli will adopt come conservative economic policies, but he won’t destroy the political model. Macri will. He’s the worst thing in the world.”

阿根廷大選 反對黨馬克里勝出

繼上月首輪投票未分勝負之後，阿根廷總統大選22日舉行二輪決選，中間偏右主張友商的反對黨候選人馬克里（Mauricio Macri）擊敗執政黨候選人希歐里勝出。他將在12月10日就職。

阿根廷四分之三投票所已完成計票，馬克里得票率53%，希歐里47%。出口民調也顯示馬克里勝券在握。

56歲的馬克里是布宜諾斯艾利斯市長，他在競選總部對大批支持者說：「今天是一個歷史性的日子。」

馬克里出身富有，父親是義大利裔商人，母親有西班牙血統。他在阿根廷出生，大學主修土木工程，畢業後曾到父親的公司工作。1991年他被綁架12天，家人付巨額贖金後獲釋，據稱此事成為他從政契機。

希歐里22日晚上承認敗選，表示已致電馬克里恭賀他勝利。希歐里是現任總統克莉絲汀娜．費南德茲的欽定接班人，而費南德茲和她已故丈夫基西納兩人一後一前執掌阿根廷政壇12年，人稱「基西納時代」。

費南德茲已做兩任，依法不能再選，於是指定布宜諾斯艾利斯省長希歐里出馬，繼續走她的左派民粹路線，如今希歐里失利，「基西納時代」正式結束。

馬克里的政見主軸是開放阿根廷市場，吸引外資，減少政府干預，解除貨幣（美元）管制以杜絕匯市黑市。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/23/world/americas/argentina-president-election-mauricio-macri.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/world/20151123/c23argentina/zh-hant/

Video：In a rebuke to long-time president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentines elected opposition leader Mauricio Macri as president. Here is how he and his opponent reacted to the election results.
http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/americas/100000004053220/rivals-react-to-election-results.html

2015-11-24．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯田思怡