BUENOS AIRES, (Reuters) – In the affluent Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires, where grand 19th century buildings hark back to an era of prosperity, middle class voters fear a presidential election on Sunday will do nothing to halt Argentina’s long decline.
“We always hope things will change for the better but they just get worse. This used to be a rich country,” said Lucila Novillo, 53, who has struggled to keep her interior design business afloat over the past four years as tight capital controls virtually paralyzed the real estate market.
All the leading candidates in the race to succeed leftist President Cristina Fernandez have promised reforms to ease the interventionist policies that her opponents and investors say have choked the economy.
Yet the front-runner is ruling party candidate Daniel Scioli, who has Fernandez’s backing and is broadly supported by poorer Argentines who benefit from expanded subsidies under her government. Scioli offers the least amount and slowest pace of change.
Many middle class voters like Novillo, who will cast her ballot for opposition candidate Mauricio Macri, fear Argentina’s problems are too deep-rooted for any one president to fix and will keep dragging it down regardless who wins.
Despite vast natural resources and a well-educated workforce, the South American country has steadily declined from its perch as one of the world’s richest nations in the 1930s, lurching from one financial crisis to the next.
While Argentina re-mains Latin America’s third largest economy, its next government will inherit a host of woes from double digit inflation and precarious foreign reserves to last year’s debt default.
“We should be a great country. We have brilliant, well-educated and creative people,” said Novillo. “These qualities should help us grow, but corruption prevents that. The roots of corruption have reached into every corner of this country.”
Most of Fernandez’s cabinet members face corruption allegations, authorities are investigating a possible money laundering scheme at a luxury hotel her family owns, and her vice president is being tried for abuse of power.
The justice system often fails to clean up such cases, many Argentines complain, fostering a lack of confidence in the country’s institutions.
