Before the Election

The Argentine electorate, 9,726,529 strong, was puzzling its way down a noisy and crowded political midway. With balloting for a constitutional assembly only a fortnight away, Buenos Aires was bright with posters, clamorous with speeches, angry with sporadic fistfights. At week's end there were 56 parties in the race, and new splinter groups and alliances were born by the day, few of them with any hint of a program. An awesome total of 2,183 candidates was competing for the 205 assembly seats.

One Program. One man with a program is President Pedro Aramburu, who pushed through the assembly plan in hopes that the group will be elected in orderly fashion July 28 and get to work Sept. 1 on an overhaul of the constitution. The Aramburu regime wants 1) a one-term limit for Presidents, 2) curbs on the President's power to legislate by decree when the Congress is adjourned, 3) repeal of the President's right to replace provincial governors at will, and 4) a stronger civil service system. Such a document, says he, would be "a death certificate for tyrants." But his plan has attracted little support from the competing politicians.

Hard-core Peronistas, outlawed as a party but still reasonably well organized through former Dictator Juan Peron's spy network, are being urged by clandestine leaflets to cast blank ballots in all elections until their hero returns. A hodgepodge of smaller parties, whose leaders fear a licking at the polls, has also come out for blank ballots. Meanwhile, the powerful Radicals faction, headed by Lawyer Arturo Frondizi, is hoping to gain control of the assembly, vote its immediate dissolution and call for general elections. The People's Radical Party, which split off from the Frondizi group last winter, is the biggest party backing Aramburu on constitutional reform.

Peronista Key. The key to the election lies with more than 2,000,000 onetime supporters of Peron who do not number themselves among the Peron-controlled hard core. If they yield to Frondizi's frantic wooing, he will gain control of the assembly and defeat constitutional reform, which will help him toward his eventual goal: the presidential office with all its powers intact. Hopefully for the Aramburu program, these voters have been drifting over to Frondizi in smaller numbers than he expected. On the other hand, if the halfhearted ex-Peronistas adopt the hard core's self-defeating plan to cast blank ballots, they may paradoxically help Aramburu by letting a pro-reform coalition get balance-of-power control of the assembly. In that event, the People's Radicals would probably lead the way in fierce haggling and vote-trading and come out with at least part of the Aramburu program.

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