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Front for a Country in Solidarity

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Solidary Country Front
Frente País Solidario
AbbreviationFREPASO
LeaderCarlos Álvarez
FoundedAugust 1994
Dissolved20 December 2001
Merger of
List
HeadquartersBuenos Aires
IdeologySocial democracy
Anti-neoliberalism[1]
Peronism
Factions:
Christian democracy
Democratic socialism
Communism
Political positionCenter-left[5] to left-wing[6]
National affiliationThe Alliance (1997–2001)
ColoursBlue, red and yellow

The Front for a Country in Solidarity (Spanish: Frente País Solidario or FREPASO) was a center-left[7] to left-wing[6] political coalition in Argentina. Its leading figures were José Octavio Bordón, Carlos "Chacho" Álvarez and Graciela Fernández Meijide. It served as an alliance front of several leftist parties and anti-Menem Peronists to protest the neoliberal policies of President Carlos Menem.[8]

History

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The coalition was formed in 1994 out of the Broad Front (Frente Grande), which had been founded mainly by progressive members of the Peronist Justicialist Party who denounced the neoliberal policies and alleged corruption of the Carlos Menem administration;[9] the Broad Front joined with other dissenting Peronists, the Unidad Socialista (Popular and Democratic Socialist Party) and several other leftist parties and individuals.

Shortly after its foundation, the coalition contested the 1995 elections, with José Octavio Bordón running for president with Carlos "Chacho" Álvarez as running mate. While the coalition did not win the election, the campaign was considered nonetheless very successful for a newly-formed alliance, as Bordón came second with 29.3% of the vote. It overperformed the performance of the Broad Front from the 1993 election by five times, winning 21.0%, compared to Broad Front's 4.2%. FrePaSo also relegated UCR to a third place in the presidential election for the first time in decades.[10]

Subsequently, Bordón proposed converting FrePaSo into a unified party, while Álvarez wanted a loose confederation of different parties. On May 17, 1995, Bordón and Álvarez announced the formation of a confederation, with a unified political platform and leadership, with the third largest block in the Argentine National Congress. The Intransigent Party and the Christian Democratic Party joined the coalition. Bordón later resigned after a leadership battle and returned to the Justicialist Party.

FrePaSo leaders believed that UCR divided the middle-class anti-PJ vote and considered it imperative to set aside programmatic differences and form a common front with the UCR to unseat the Justicialist Party. The FrePaSo campaigned for the 1999 elections in an alliance with the larger Radical Civic Union (UCR) and a few provincial parties, the Alliance for Work, Justice, and Education (known simply as the Alliance), which won the presidency for Fernando de la Rúa. The anti-Menem coalition of UCR and FrePaSo placed first in the 1999 presidential and general elections, ending a decade of Peronist dominance. This victory seemed to solidify FrePaSo's third party status, and several scholars believed that FrePaSo would become an institutionalized, permanent force in the Argentine politics.[10]

Frepaso politician Aníbal Ibarra was elected Mayor of Buenos Aires in 2000 on the Alliance ticket. However, upon taking office, De la Rúa appointed a neoliberal José Luis Machinea as the Economy Minister, and announced cuts to education and social services. FrePaSo decried these policies, and vice president Chacho Álvarez resigned amidst public intra-party accusations of bribery in the Senate, followed shortly after by other leading members. In early 2001, De la Rúa implemented further spending cuts, leading to resignations and open rebellion against the government by FrePaSo and progressive elements of the UCR. De la Rúa retorted to ruling by decree and relying on Menemists.[11]

Contrary to the expectations, De la Rúa's austerity policies did not result in growth. Instead, the recession persisted, and unemployment rose, while tax revenue continued to fall and offset the spending cuts. The voters now blamed the Alliance for the Argentina's recession and debt. Giovanni Grisendi argued that the Alliance government, and by extension FrePaSo which supported it, "now ‘owned’ Argentina’s recession and debt, creating a political crisis for the country’s new governing coalition." Further issues emerged in late 2000 when a major corruption scandal broke out regarding bribery in the Senate. Eleven senators were found to have accepted payments totaling four million US dollars to support the 2000 labor market reform. The payments originated from, among others, the Labor Secretary Alberto Flamarique, who was a member of FrePaSo.[10]

After the 2001 elections, FrePaSo became the joint third largest party in the federal Chamber of Deputies, with 17 of 257 deputies. Following the December 2001 riots, the party disintegrated, owing to the continued economic crisis, corruption scandal, and the neoliberal policies of the government that it initially supported.[10] Many members re-joined the Peronist movement within the centre-left Front for Victory faction of President Néstor Kirchner, with others supporting the ARI party of Elisa Carrió. Until 2007 the party nominally retained one senator, Vilma Ibarra, who sat as a lone 'Party for Victory' member but in practice supported the Front for Victory, for which she became a national deputy in 2007. Her brother Aníbal Ibarra was removed as Mayor of Buenos Aires in 2006 in the wake of the Cromañón nightclub fire.

Member parties

[edit]
Party Leader[a] Ideology
Broad Front Graciela Fernández Meijide Social democracy
Communist Party Patricio Echegaray Communism
Christian Democratic Party Mario Alfredo Marturet Christian democracy
Intransigent Party Enrique Gustavo Cardesa Social democracy
Humanist Party Lía Méndez Humanism
Popular Socialist Party Guillermo Estévez Boero Democratic socialism
Democratic Socialist Party Alfredo Bravo Social democracy
Open Politics for Social Integrity José Octavio Bordón Peronism
Front of the South Fernando Solanas Progressivism
Notes
  1. ^ At the time of the front's dissolution (2001)

See also

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References

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  1. ^
    • Lupu, Noam (2018). "Party Brands, Partisan Erosion, and Party Breakdown". In Scott Mainwaring (ed.). Party Systems in Latin America: Institutionalization, Decay, and Collapse (PDF). Cambridge University Press. p. 370. doi:10.1017/9781316798553. ISBN 9781316798553. In 1997, it formalized an alliance with the left-wing FREPASO to solidify its anti-neoliberal credentials. FREPASO leaders – themselves defectors from the ranks of the PJ – had emphasized the social costs of neoliberal policies on unemployment, poverty, and inequality, and promised to work to address them.
    • Van Dyck, Brandon Philip (2014). The Paradox of Adversity: New Left Party Survival and Collapse in Latin America (Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Political Science thesis). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. p. 49. Mexico's PRD and Argentina's FREPASO also have parallel formations. Both originated as left-wing, anti-neoliberal, elite splinter groups from dominant, traditionally populist parties that had adopted market reforms and fiscal austerity: the PRI in Mexico and the Peronists (PJ) in Argentina.
  2. ^ Vázquez, Amancio (2014). La conformación de La Alianza UCR – Frepaso (1997 – 2001). Usos de las teorías de negociación política para el estudio de las coaliciones. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. pp. 1–17.
  3. ^ Escudero, Laura Verónica (2016). La centroizquierda en la Argentina: El frente país solidario (FREPASO), la alianza y el frente para la victoria (FPV)-Kirchnerismo (Thesis). Universidad de Salamanca.
  4. ^ Castiglioni, Franco (November–December 1998). "Argentina ¿Hacia una nueva configuración política?" (PDF). Nueva Sociedad (158): 4–11.
  5. ^ [2][3][4]
  6. ^ a b
    • Murillo, María Victoria; Ronconi, Lucas (2002). "The Politicization of Public Sector Labor Relations: Argentine Teachers' Strikes in a Decentralized Education System" (PDF). Working Papers. 47. Universidad de San Andres, Departamento de Economia: 18. To those provinces where the main union is affiliated to CTERA (a founding member of the left wing FREPASO party) and the governor is Peronist or right wing, a value of 1 was assigned, with the exception of provinces where the union leaders were politically close to the local Peronist party.
    • Borges, André; Burtnik, Lucía (22–24 July 2016). Presidential elections and the nationalization of political parties in federal countries: comparing parties and institutions in Brazil and Argentina (PDF). VIII Congreso Latinoamericano de Ciencia Política. Asociación Latinoamericana de Ciencia Política (ALACIP). p. 15. FREPASO and ARI/CC received the highest scores, which reflects the fact that these are relatively centralized, national-oriented left-wing organizations that organized mainly to dispute the presidency and present themselves as an alternative to PJ-UCR polarization.
    • Dinerstein, Ana C. (2015). "Roadblocks in Argentina: Against the Violence of Stability". Capital & Class. 25 (2). University of Iowa Libraries: 7. doi:10.1177/030981680107400101. Consequently, those cabinet members who belonged to the left-wing FREPASO within the Alianza, led by the Minister of the Interior Storani, left the government as a sign of opposition to the shift to the right of the de la Rúa administration.
    • Murillo, Marin Victoria; Ronconi, Lucas (2020). "Teachers' Strikes in Argentina: Partisan Alignments and Public-sector Labor Relations" (PDF). Studies in Comparative International Development. 39 (1): 95. At the national level, CTERA was one of the national labor organizations affiliated with the left-wing FREPASO.
    • Lupu, Noam (2018). "Party Brands, Partisan Erosion, and Party Breakdown". In Scott Mainwaring (ed.). Party Systems in Latin America: Institutionalization, Decay, and Collapse (PDF). Cambridge University Press. p. 370. doi:10.1017/9781316798553. ISBN 9781316798553. In 1997, it formalized an alliance with the left-wing FREPASO to solidify its anti-neoliberal credentials.
    • Van Dyck, Brandon Philip (2014). The Paradox of Adversity: New Left Party Survival and Collapse in Latin America (Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Political Science thesis). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. p. 8. For example, Middlebrook (2000: 4) operationalizes party success as twenty percent of the vote in two consecutive congressional or presidential elections, but on this measure, Argentina's meteoric new left party, FREPASO, would qualify as a success even though it collapsed within a decade of its creation – and just several years after becoming a serious national contender.
  7. ^ Aznárez, Juan Jesús (9 October 1995). "Derrota peronista en las elecciones de Buenos Aires". El País.
  8. ^ Underwood, Patrick (2016). Conflict and Stability in the Neoliberal Era: Explaining Urban Unrest in Latin America (Doctor of Philosophy thesis). University of Washington. p. 111. FREPASO, short for Frente por un Pas Solidario (Front for a Nation of Solidarity), was an alliance front comprised of several leftist parties and dissident Peronists opposed to Menem.
  9. ^ Wendy Hunter (13 September 2010). The Transformation of the Workers' Party in Brazil, 1989–2009. Cambridge University Press. pp. 188–190. ISBN 978-1-139-49266-9.
  10. ^ a b c d Van Dyck, Brandon Philip (2014). The Paradox of Adversity: New Left Party Survival and Collapse in Latin America (Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Political Science thesis). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. pp. 298–306.
  11. ^ Lupu, Noam (2018). "Party Brands, Partisan Erosion, and Party Breakdown". In Scott Mainwaring (ed.). Party Systems in Latin America: Institutionalization, Decay, and Collapse (PDF). Cambridge University Press. p. 370. doi:10.1017/9781316798553. ISBN 9781316798553.
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