Alberto Fernández faces a week full of geopolitical events that will test his diplomatic strategy

Alberto Fernández designs all foreign policy, listen to some advice from Gustavo Béliz -Secretary of Strategic Affairs- and leave Felipe Solá this minimal aliquot of the diplomatic agenda which can be accomplished without strategic damage to Argentina’s international relations.

The Head of State has decided to face Jair Bolsonaro and Luis Lacalle Pou in Mercosur, stand out from Colombia and Ecuador within the Organization of American States (OAS), follow the regional tactics of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), support the populist regimes of Bolivia and Venezuela, and support China and Russia when they do health marketing in Latin America with their COVID-19 vaccines.

Alberto Fernández’s diplomatic priorities have strong repercussions on Argentina’s foreign relations, which is isolated in the Mercosur and the OAS, dependent on authoritarian governments, and unable to build a consensus that will allow it to reach key spaces in multilateral organizations to influence the road map of Latin America.

The Andean Development Corporation (CAF) is a bank with funds of $ 28,000 million and significant regional weight. Alberto Fernández wants Argentina to lead CAF and has decided to appoint Christian Asinelli, Under-Secretary for International Financial Relations. The president has already failed in his attempt to take over the leadership of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and now he’s heading for another diplomatic defeat.

The election of the new CAF chief will take place tomorrow in Mexico City. Béliz and Asinelli went there, and everything allows us to ensure that Sergio Diaz-Granados will defeat the candidate from Argentina. 10 votes are needed, and Díaz Granados would already have them to his credit.

CAF has five dual voting countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. Eleven with a single vote: Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Trinidad Tobago, Panama, Paraguay and Uruguay. And thirteen private banks that make up a single voice.

Barbados, Chile, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Portugal and the Dominican Republic are members of the CAF Board of Directors, but they do not have a vote to elect or dismiss their authorities.

In this context, until last night in Mexico, the votes were distributed as follows:

Argentina: Bolivia (2), Venezuela (2), Mexico (1), Trinidad Tobago (1), and his (1). Total: 7 votes.

Colombia: Ecuador (2), Peru (2), Brazil (1), Panama (1), Uruguay (1), private banks (1) and itself (2). Total: 10 votes.

Need 10 voices to win the elections.

There are three countries which are in a particular situation, a few hours before the ballot in Mexico: Paraguay, Spain and Peru.

Mario Abdo Benítez is the President of Paraguay. Benítez has a brother named Benigno López. López is Vice President of Sectors and Knowledge at CAF. Colombian candidate Sergio Díaz-Granados has promised the Paraguayan president that his brother López will be named vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), if he turns his back on Argentina and supports his nomination.

Going from the vice-presidency of sectors and knowledge of CAF to vice-presidency of the IDB is like leaving the Paraguayan consulate in Kirkuk (Iraq) to work as the Paraguayan ambassador in Paris.

Alberto Fernández spoke by phone with Benitez to ask for his vote. A prominent politician from the ruling coalition traveled to Paraguay to demand the vote. And Asinelli arrived in Asunción to ask for his vote. At three o’clock, the Paraguayan president replied, or ordered to say, that he was thinking about it.

If there is no political miracle, Benitez will vote for Colombia. And his brother Benigno will be vice-president of the IDB.

Then, with Paraguay’s confirmed vote, Colombia with Díaz-Granados would get 11 votes, a figure that Argentina cannot exceed.

Alberto Fernández maintains excellent personal and political relations with Pedro Sánchez, head of the Spanish government. Sánchez promised he would vote for Asinelli, and its diplomatic representatives in Latin America reiterate this diplomatic decision in all closed-door meetings.

But the socialist leader knows how the cards are played on the international stage. And he would just officially announce his vote for Argentina, if Asinelli can defeat Díaz-Granados in the vote. The most likely is that Spain will abstain, final figures which yesterday were discussed in Olivos and Moncloa.

All accounts can change, if Peru voted as its quasi-president Pedro Castillo wants, instead of the political decision taken by Francisco Sagasti, who will step down from the Peruvian presidency on July 28.

Castillo supports Asinelli, while Sagasti supports Díaz-Granados. Sagasti is president until July 28, and on that day Castillo is expected to be sworn in to succeed him. But electoral justice has yet to confirm his victory over Keiko Fujimori, and Sagasti retains all the powers and powers of the post.

Conclusion: the Peruvian vote in favor of Díaz-Granados is legitimate, and Alberto Fernández can do nothing to displace Sagasti and impose the will of Castillo, who would come to power at the end of July.

If the election of Castillo was confirmed tomorrow before the elections, Asinelli would have the necessary votes to lead CAF. Peru drags Panama, with these three votes Spain would support Argentina and Paraguay would turn 180 degrees because Colombia could no longer honor its offer for the brother of Abdo Benítez.

But it would be a fact of magical realism, and we know that Gabriel Garcia Marquez he was born in Colombia.

Asinelli will lose the vote in CAF, as also happened with Beliz in the IDB, because Alberto Fernández’s diplomatic agenda is erratic. The president does not have the votes of his partners in Mercosur -Brazil-Uruguay and Paraguay-, and he has failed to maintain an equidistant relationship with Colombia and Ecuador.

With the voices of Jair Bolsonaro, Luis Lacalle Pou and Benítez, plus a logical deal with Ivan Duque, Argentina would have crowned an unprecedented triumph in multilateral organizations in Latin America. Asinelli would have been the first holder of CAF who does not belong to an Andean country and is a member of Mercosur.

However, the problem is not CAF. A defeat there is just an emergence of a political situation that depends on Alberto Fernández, his worldview and Felipe Solá’s role as chancellor. The president assumes that China is a strategic enemy of the White House and knows that Joseph Biden is the key to closing negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Paris Club.

However, Alberto Fernández agreed to participate in the celebrations of 100 years of the creation of the Chinese Communist Party. Xi Jinping issued the invitation and the head of state will deliver his speech next Tuesday. He will be the only Latin American president who will participate in the political event, and will speak after the Chinese leader.

To the probable defeat of CAF and its speech in front of the communist nomenclature of China, we must add the complex institutional situation of Mercosur. Alberto Fernández faces Bolsonaro and Lacalle Pou for ideological, economic and personal reasons, and next Thursday the 8th there will be a summit for Argentina to hand over the Pro Tempore presidency to Brazil.

At this protocol summit, if there is no professional work in Mercosur diplomacy, the regional forum risks being in danger of implosion. Bolsonaro is fed up with Alberto Fernández, and very irritated by his support for Lula da Silva’s candidacy.

And Lacalle Pou is behind: considers that the Peronist president is an obstacle to Mercosur and it already plays only to improve the economy of Uruguay without counting on the assistance of Buenos Aires in the multilateral organization. From this point of view, the story is easy to tell: Argentina is isolated against the tandem of Bolsonaro and Lacalle Pou, who have strong ideological differences with Alberto Fernández.

The president makes his foreign policy decisions and then communicates them to Solá. The Minister of Foreign Affairs carries out orders and has little influence on the diplomatic agenda designed by Alberto Fernández. In recent days, Solá was in Italy, Tunisia and Austria, realizing a roadmap linked to the G20, relations with Africa and Argentina’s strategy at the center of Europe.

It was a formal tour with important bilateral exchanges – a meeting with Antony Blinken, Secretary of State – and a single scandal: the chancellor went to bed at 15 members of the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Italian Parliament. Notice half an hour before he didn’t go. He chose to spend two hours with Cardinal Peter Turkson, who works at the Dicastery for the Human Development Service.

Solá was on the sidelines of the CAF negotiations, he still does not know what Alberto Fernández will say against XI, and even less what he will do against Bolsonaro and Lacalle Pou. The Chancellor will arrive in Ezeiza on Tuesday 6 June.

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