General elections were held in Argentina on 25 October 2015 to elect the President and National Congress, and followed primary elections which were held on 9 August 2015. A second round of voting between the two leading candidates took place on 22 November, after surprisingly close results forced a runoff. On the first runoff voting ever held for an Argentine Presidential Election, Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri narrowly defeated Front for Victory candidate and Buenos Aires Province Governor Daniel Scioli with 51% of the vote. Macri's vote count of nearly 13 million votes made it the highest number of votes any candidate has ever received in Argentinian history until Javier Milei's victory in the 2023 presidential election. He took office on 10 December, making him the first freely elected president in almost a century who was not either a Radical or a Peronist.
Macri performed better among higher-income provinces in the central area of the country, while Scioli performed strongly in poorer provinces in the northwest, the northeast and Patagonia.
Background
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was re-elected in 2011. As the Constitution of Argentina does not allow more than two consecutive terms, several politicians from the Front for Victory (FPV) speculated about a constitutional amendment to allow unlimited re-elections. This idea was heavily resisted by the opposition parties, and the FPV could not reach the required two-thirds majority in Congress. The mid-term elections in 2013 ended the FPV's hope for a constitutional amendment after they failed to win the necessary supermajority.
Electoral system
The election of the president was carried out using the ballotage system, a modified version of the two-round system in which a candidate can win the presidency in the first round either by receiving 45% of the vote, or by receiving 40% of the vote and finishing at least 10 percentage points ahead of the second-place candidate. Voting is compulsory for citizens between 18 and 70 years old. Suffrage was also extended to 16- and 17-year-olds, though without compulsory voting.
There are a total of 257 seats of the Chamber of Deputies, elected from 24 electoral districts–the 23 provinces, plus the federal district of Buenos Aires, which its own executive and legislature and is represented in the national Congress like all other provinces. The number of seats are distributed in relation to the population of the province. In order to be in concordance with the "one-third female" law enforces that one-third of the overall seats in the Chamber of Deputies are female. The 130 seats of the Chamber of Deputies up for election were elected from 24 multi-member constituencies based on the 23 provinces and Buenos Aires. Seats were allocated using the D'Hondt method of proportional representation, with an electoral threshold of 3%.
The 24 seats in the Senate up for election were elected in three-seat constituencies using the closed list system. Each district is represented by three senatorial seats. Each party is allowed to register up to two candidates; one of those registered must be female. The party receiving the most votes wins two seats, and the second-placed party won one. The third senatorial seat was established in the Constitution of 1994 in order to better represent the largest minority in each district.
Parties and coalitions provided their own ballot papers, which voters placed in sealed envelopes. However, voters were able to cut ballot papers up and place different sections from different parties inside the envelope if they wanted to vote for different candidates or lists for different posts. Being under a Federal system, it is possible for different provinces to use different systems.
In Buenos Aires and Salta electronic voting machines were used to print out a single unified ballot, with voters able to select different candidates and parties on a touch screen. Other municipalities such as Bariloche opted for a non-electronic single unified ballot. Opposition candidates, including Sergio Massa, Mauricio Macri and Margarita Stolbizer called for the nationwide implementation of a unified ballot and/or electronic voting, though Massa in particular was more cautious, saying it was more realistic for such a system to be implemented by 2017. The authority in charge of regulating elections rejected changing the system within 2015 since they claimed it would be too short term to implement the changes and explain to the public how the new system works.
Candidates
General election
Six candidates received at least 1.5% of the vote in the primary elections and were able to contest the general election.
Cambiemos
Mauricio Macri, from the Republican Proposal, was the mayor of Buenos Aires city. Many smaller parties had created a coalition the previous year, the Broad Front UNEN. Elisa Carrió of the Civic Coalition left it to join Macri. An internal congress of the Radical Civic Union decided to do so as well, and proposing Ernesto Sanz as their precandidate. UNEN was thus disbanded, and the three candidates ran for the coalition Cambiemos. Margarita Stolbizer refused to join the coalition with Macri, and ran in a separate party instead.
Front for Victory
Initially, the FPV had several pre-candidates to the presidency, but only Daniel Scioli and Florencio Randazzo had a good reception in the opinion polls. Scioli was resisted by factions of the party that did not consider him truly loyal to Kirchner. All the minor candidates resigned when Kirchner asked them to do so. Randazzo resigned as well some weeks before the primary elections, leaving Scioli as the sole precandidate of the FPV. Randazzo did not accept to run for governor of the Buenos Aires province, which had primary elections between minister Aníbal Fernández and Julián Domínguez. Fernández won the local primary elections.
Other candidates
in alphabetical order
Primary elections
The candidates of five parties failed in their attempt at passing the 1.5% threshold in the primary elections that would have allowed them to run in the general election.
Campaign and controversies
With Kirchner unable to run, three candidates led the opinion polls; Daniel Scioli, Sergio Massa and Mauricio Macri. Several controversies took place during the time of the elections, or related to the elections themselves.
The primary elections and some local elections had scandals of Electoral fraud. There was a frequent theft of ballot papers from the polling places. State-owned Correo Argentino collects the results of each school and sends them to a centralized location for their global count; there have been reports of inconsistencies between the results signed in the schools and those informed by Correo Argentino. Tucumán even had a case of people burning ballot boxes, which led to several demonstrations at Plaza Independencia. There was policial repression on those demonstrations, leading to further scandals.
Journalist Jorge Lanata aired an interview with a prisoner sentenced for the 2008 Triple crime, who claimed that Aníbal Fernández was the mastermind of that crime. This increased the tensions between Fernández and Domínguez, as Fernández considered that Domínguez helped Lanata somehow. Scioli stayed away from both precandidates to governor in the last week before the primary elections, which were won by Fernández.
Ariel Velázquez, a sympathizer of the Radical Civic Union, was shot in his house in Jujuy, after taking part in the political campaign. He died two weeks later, and the Tupac Amaru organization (led by Kirchnerite Milagro Sala) was blamed for it. President Cristina Kirchner claimed that he was not a Radical, which was refuted by his family.
Several cities in the Buenos Aires Province suffered big floods during the primary elections, and the following week. The flood affected 10,000 people. Daniel Scioli had left to Italy at that moment, and made a rushed return. Mauricio Macri considered it a result of poor urban planning under Scioli's provincial government, and compared it with the lack of flooding in Buenos Aires during the same storm, which had undergone flood prevention works under his leadership. Scioli accused users of social networks to plot to damage his public image, and claimed that he has all of them identified.
Vote buying is also a common tool utilized in Argentine elections. As for this election, the director for the Center for Research and Social Action, Rodrigo Zarazaga stated, “Vote buying strategies will probably sway 5 to 12 percent of Argentine voters on Sunday.” An example of vote buying during this election took place in Buenos Aires. Voters in this area were given the option to vote for particular candidates during the municipal elections in Tucumán. The Argentine citizens that actually promised had received “sacks stuffed with bottles of cooking oil, pasta and flour.”
Results
Primary elections
Open primary elections for the Presidency were held nationwide on 9 August 2015. With this system, all parties run primary elections on a single ballot. All parties must take part in it, both the parties with internal factions and parties with a single candidate list. Citizens may vote for any candidate of any party, but may only cast a single vote. The most voted candidate of parties gaining 1.5% or higher of the valid votes advances to the general election.
Scioli led the field with 38.41% of the vote, nearly 8 percentage points ahead of Macri; both figures would have placed him close to the threshold for avoiding a ballotage. Sergio Massa finished third. Both Macri and Massa easily defeated their rivals in the primary elections; Scioli, Stolbizer and Rodríguez Saá were the single candidates of their respective parties. Nicolás del Caño defeated Altamira, and became the unexpected candidate for the Worker's Left Front.
President
Opinion polls previous to the result suggested that Scioli would win by a wide margin, and might even be able to avoid a ballotage. However, the final results showed only a narrow lead for Scioli, with his 37% just ahead of Macri's 34%, leading to a runoff on 22 November. Massa finished third with 21% of the vote and both remaining candidates sought to secure the backing of Massa's voters. Both candidates were polarized on the opinion about the presidency of Cristina Kirchner: Scioli proposed to keep most of the Kirchnerite policies, and Macri to change them. In the legislative elections, the FPV lost the majority of the Chamber of Deputies, but kept the majority of the Senate.
Scioli declined to attend the first leaders' debate previous to the elections, which was held between the other five candidates instead. When the ballotage was confirmed, he asked Macri for a presidential debate between both candidates, which was accepted. Two debates were being organized: one by the NGO "Argentina debate", and another one by the TV news channel Todo Noticias. Macri preferred to take part in a single debate with Scioli, and opted for the one organized by Argentina Debate.
Macri criticized Scioli for a negative campaigning launched by the Front for Victory. Several politicians and state institutions run by the FPV released messages warning about terrible things that may happen if Macri was elected president. Scioli claims that it was a campaign to encourage public awareness. It is rumored that the campaign may have been suggested by the Brazilian João Santana, who organized a similar one in Brazil during the ballotage of Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves.
The ballotage was held on 22 November. Daniel Scioli accepted his defeat when 70% of the votes were counted; the provisional results were 53% and 47% at that moment. The distance between both candidates slowly narrowed in the following hours, leading to a smaller victory margin for Macri than most exit polls suggested. Nevertheless, his victory ended the 12-year rule of Kirchnerism in the country.
Macri owed his victory to Córdoba, the second-largest province, swinging dramatically to support him; he carried the province by over 930,000 votes in the second round, far exceeding his nationwide margin of 680,600 votes. Buenos Aires also swung hard to Macri, giving its mayor over 64 percent of the vote in the second round.
Provincial governors
On 25 October elections numerous provinces also elected governors, with the new ones beginning their terms on 10 December 2015. These provinces were Buenos Aires province, Catamarca, Chubut, Entre Ríos, Formosa, Jujuy, La Pampa, Misiones, San Juan, San Luis and Santa Cruz, encompassing 11 of the country's 23 provinces. The other provinces elected governors in different days of 2015; the only exceptions were Corrientes and Santiago del Estero whose governors' terms were not due to finish in 2015.