MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Presidential debate 'widened the gap' for Macri; Scioli unable to transmit his true profile

The main problem of Scioli's campaign has been he never was able to convince whether he was competing with president Cristina Fernandez or with Macri.

Argentina's Sunday debate between the two presidential hopefuls has “widened the gap”, which means the mayor of Buenos Aires City, Mauricio Macri could win the runoff on 22 November by more than ten points over incumbent Daniel Scioli, according to political analyst Jorge Giacobbe.

 “I can't trust the numbers of my public opinion poll from Saturday, because Sunday changed the whole scenario”, he added arguing that Scioli was unable to transmit his true personality during the debate since “he's a non aggressive fellow, rather conservative in his statements and comments. I didn't see that on Sunday”.

Giacobbe added that the main problem of Scioli's campaign has been he never was able to convince whether he was competing with president Cristina Fernandez (and all the back draws of Kirchnerism) or Macri.

“I believe he tried hard to get this through during the debate, but at the end he was unable to transmit the true Scioli”, said the political analyst.

The fact is that as the incumbent candidate he was only able to propose continuity that is “the same that is going on now, he was unable to get through with the modifications that are needed or people were asking for”.

Further on Giacobbe said Scioli tried to show his connection with all the good things of Kirchnerism, “which are not few, but he also had to take on all the pack of complaints, public opinion has regarding the mismanagement and bad performance of the government. It's an ambiguous position, and certainly not easy”.

And overall, “Scioli represents an outgoing government”. Giacobbe mentioned what happened with the incumbent candidate of former president Raul Alfonsín, Eduardo Angleoz; with Eduardo Duhalde who was chosen to succeed Carlos Menem, “it's most difficult to make proposals from the very place where things are happening that are not supported”.

More specifically “the Kirchner governments have been 'most intense'. The big problem with Kirchnerism is that it is too intense, involved in every issue, and aggressive in its attitude, no middle ground, little space for conciliation”.

The fact that Scioli was unable to mark his own profile was revealed in a survey on the image of the candidates. In effect Macri's negative image which was always high, actually dropped to 30% and the positive image soared to 60%.

This contrasts with what happened to Scioli, a leader known for his prudence and good manners in politics even in the most humiliating circumstances. In effect the Buenos Aires province governor never had a negative image above 20%.

Now however for the first time in Scioli's political activity, the negative and positive image are even at 50%. A very similar situation to that of president Cristina Fernández who in the last three years of her government had to cope with balanced percentages of positive and negative image.

In other words Scioli was absorbed and lost the attractiveness of his independence, despite being an 'aye aye' man.