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When Argentines went to the polls on 25 October 2015, they set up a first in their country's political history. Never before had there been a presidential runoff (required if no candidate receives 45 percent of the valid votes in the first round), but there would be one in 2015. The Peronist governor of Buenos Aires Province, Daniel Scioli, was the top vote-getter with 37 percent, but closely trailing him was City of Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri with 34 percent. A third major candidate, Sergio Massa, played the spoiler with 21 percent. A former powerboat racer turned politician, Scioli was the handpicked successor to the termlimited incumbent, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-15). He promised to maintain the achievements in economic and social policy that many voters credit to Kirchner and her predecessor (2003-07) and late husband Néstor Kirchner, who died in 2010. Scioli ran as the standardbearer of the Kirchners' wing of Peronism, the Front for Victory (FPV).
Macri, the first-round runner-up, was a prominent businessman serving his second term as mayor of Argentina's capital and largest city. He was the candidate of a coalition of non-Peronist opposition parties known as Cambiemos (Let's Change). Its members included Macri's own party, the center-right Republican Proposal (PRO), as well as the historic Radical Civic Union (UCR) and a party that grew out of the country's 2001-02 economic and political crisis, the Civic Coalition (CC) of Elisa Carrió, who had lost to Cristina Kirchner in 2007.
Massa, the mayor of Tigre in Buenos Aires Province, was a dissident Peronist. A onetime member of the Chamber of Deputies, he had served as chief of cabinet (a constitutional office somewhat resembling that of prime minister) during Cristina Kirchner's first term. He had oppor- tunistically broken with the FPV in 2013 when forming his own party gave him better electoral odds. In 2015, his party joined other dissident Peronists to form the United for a New Alternative (UNA) coalition.
Macri's surprising first-round showing gave him momentum going into the November 22 runoff. His party had retained the mayoralty of Buenos Aires City while also taking the governorship of the populous and politically powerful province of Buenos Aires, becoming the first nonPeronist party to win there since 1987. Macri's PRO also...