Two previews

The elections keep coming, with two important countries going to the polls on Sunday. Apart from both being presidential systems, they don’t have a lot in common – and even that similarity is less than obvious on the surface.

Switzerland will elect both houses of its legislature, the 200-seat National Council and the 46-seat Council of States. They then meet jointly to elect the executive, a seven-person presidency called the Federal Council, but there’s full separation of powers: once the executive is elected it can thumb its nose at the legislature. Typically, however, it does no such thing; Swiss politics proceeds mostly by consensus.

That consensus has survived, not without some tension, the rise of the far right in the shape of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which since 1999 has been consistently the largest single party. At the last election, in 2019, it won 25.6% of the vote, down somewhat from its peak of 29.4% recorded in 2015. Another four parties reached double figures: the Social Democrats (16.8%), Liberals (15.1%), Greens (13.2%) and Christian Democrats (11.4%).

The fact that the Greens overtook the centre-right means that the identity of the top four changed for the first time in a hundred years. But that still didn’t win them a seat on the Federal Council, since they are also allocated by consensus. The top three parties each took two seats, and the Christian Democrats kept the seventh.

The Christian Democrats subsequently merged with a smaller centre-right party, the Conservative Democrats, which had won 2.5% of the vote and three seats, so counting the combined total – they’re now just called the Centre – puts them back in fourth place. And opinion polls show the Greens vote, in line with the recent European trend, easing off and back to around 10% (plus another 7% or so for the Green Liberals, who placed sixth last time with 7.8%).

The SVP is still well out in front, back up to the high 20s, with the Social Democrats in the high teens and the Liberals and Centre fighting out third place in the low to mid-teens. Seats in the National Council are allocated proportionally (D’Hondt) within each canton; last time the SVP won 53, as against 39 centre-left, 29 Liberals, 28 each for the Greens and the combined centre-right, and 16 Green Liberals.

So even if the far right improves a bit, the numbers are easily there for the mainstream parties to freeze it out if they were so minded. But that’s not the Swiss way of doing things.

Argentina, on the other hand, is voting directly for president and vice-president, as well as half of the lower house and a third of the Senate. Incumbent president Alberto Fernández (left-Peronist), elected on the first round in 2019, has decided not to seek re-election, as has his vice-president, former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (not related). Their administration has been plagued by runaway inflation and other problems, and suffered badly in mid-term legislative elections two years ago.

There are three serious candidates for the presidency. The left-Peronists, now called Union for the Homeland, are running economy minister Sergio Massa; the centre-right opposition ticket, Together for Change, is headed by former security minister Patricia Bullrich; and the far right is backing so-called “libertarian” Javier Milei. There is also a right-Peronist, Juan Schiaretti, plus Trotskyist Myriam Bergman, but both are well back.

On the figures from the nationwide primaries held two months ago, the big three were all close together, with Milei slightly in the lead. Since then, opinion polls have mostly shown that lead increasing, although there is considerable variability (and no polls can be published in the final week). Bullrich has been holding her ground, somewhere around the 30% mark, while Massa is the one who looks in most trouble, dropping into the mid-20s.

To win on the first round a candidate needs either to get above 45% of the vote, or to get above 40% and be more then ten points ahead of the runner-up. Failing either of those, a runoff will be held in four weeks time, on 19 November. Fernández won last time with 48.2%, but the chance of anyone repeating that seems slim; most probably, unless the polls are badly wrong, Milei and Bullrich will go through to the second round.

In that case one would naturally assume that most of the Peronists will rally to Bullrich, but a lot could happen in the intervening month, particularly if Milei manages a substantial first-round lead. It hasn’t been a good year for the left in South America, and for now it doesn’t look like getting any better.