On September 17, 1998, one Friday afternoon, the then radical governor Ramón Bautista Mestre surprised by making December 20 of that year official as the date of the provincial elections.
Mestre had come from three complicated years, after receiving a province in crisis from his predecessor and coreligionist, Eduardo César Angeloz.
The radical president aspired to go for his re-election, with a latent threat: the Peronist José Manuel de la Sota was going for his third attempt to reach the then Casa de las Tejas.
To turn the electoral fight into a “hand in hand” with De la Sota, Mestre only called to vote for governor and vice, without provincial legislators.
Then the Legislature was bicameral, with representatives and senators. In addition, Mestre asked the radical mayors not to advance the local elections. “He wants a hand-to-hand fight with ‘el Gallego’ De la Sota,” a black palate mestrista graphically depicted in those days.
That same afternoon of the announcement, the then mayor of Oncativo, Francisco Fortuna, called De la Sota, who was in Brazil, to inform him of the news.
Fortuna was the president of the block of Peronist mayors, better grouped than in previous electoral processes, which had ended in defeats for Peronism.
De la Sota was preparing for what he considered his last attempt to be governor. A few months earlier, he had formed a political table with the main provincial Peronist leaders.
Carlos Caserio and Jorge “el Zurdo” Montoya were in charge of building the interior, while Olga Riutort (then wife of De la Sota), along with Herman Olivero, shaped the structure of PJ Capital.
With the confirmation of the date of the elections, De la Sota expanded his political table, in which he began to analyze the proposal that Fortuna had brought and that had the rapid support: that the mayors of the PJ (then there were 133) advance the municipal elections and made them coincide with the provincial ones.
Thus was born the strategy that the Cordovan PJ repeated since then in the last 24 years, and that will now be reissued: support of the largest number of municipalities governed by Peronism to strengthen the electoral chances of the candidate for governor Martín Llaryora.
“Since 1998 we became a provincial party. What happened to us in the radical mandates is now happening to them: there is dispersion of the mayors in support of their candidate for governor”, now reasons a Peronist.
194 municipalities governed by the PJ will elect a mayor on June 25. The majority of the pro-government municipal and community chiefs adhered to this strategy, beyond the fact that the percentage of voters involved is less than 20%.
For now, the striking exception is the Capital, where 37% of the provincial census lives. Despite the fact that it is governed by the PJ, everything indicates that the mayor of Córdoba will be elected in split elections, probably at the end of July.
It is known that Llaryora preferred to hold the elections, confident in the high image of his management in the capital. But he prevailed over the plan of Governor Juan Schiaretti, who has a first and last name: Rodrigo de Loredo. In the Civic Center they do not want to know anything about Luis Juez and De Loredo sharing a dark room when provincial power is at stake and in the Capital.
If the radical De Loredo accompanies Judge in the provincial formula, some oficialistas will regret not having hit the elections. The opponents’ game of not showing their cards wastes time, but it complicated the PJ’s electoral strategy.