Los partidos de izquierda ante la encrucijada electoral. Adaptación y electoralismo del Frente de Izquierda en la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires

In this paper we analyse the effects of implementing the system of open, simultaneous, and compulsory primaries (PASO) —one of the key pieces of the political-electoral reform enacted in Argentina in 2009. Here we will try to show the unsuccessful adaptation of a recently joined coalition to electoral rules also recently established. This paper will focus on the adaptation by left wing parties to the new regulations. We shall examine the electoral performance of these parties through three electoral processes in which the PASO were applied. In sum, it can be said that in the first two applications of the PASO system, the FIT was able to overcome limitations of the electoral reform, arguing the three pillars on which is had originally supported (the claim of the unity of the left, the explicit denunciation of the restrictive character of the reform and the preservation of the internal balances). But, by 2015, on the other hand, although fratricidal competition, adaptation to the electioneering and the outrage of the pre-existing balances, did not reach to fracture to the FIT or to make it back to previous levels, but it constituted a brake on the rise of the revolutionary left process, undertaken in the last stretch of the Kirchner Government.