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Editorial: Last-minute campaign rush
Buenos Aires Herald
June 20, 2009

By Michael Soltys, Senior Editor

Electioneering is never subtle by definition but surely the sham of pretending to honour President Cristina Fern ndez de Kirchner's pledge of a multimode electronic ticket before next Sunday's elections represents a new low in being crass. Early in February CFK had promised to have this local equivalent of London's Oyster Card up and running within 90 days. That deadline came and went more than six weeks ago without anything happening and nor did anything happen in the ensuing six weeks. But this week the government could not delay action any longer without falling into breach of promise (short of delaying elections which they themselves had brought forward by four months). They thus came out with the improvised expedient of producing 50,000 SUBE cards to be distributed at five different venues yesterday a ludicrously inadequate substitute for the approximately nine million daily trips in every form of transport in this metropolis.

For the sake of this token bid to honour a campaign promise which does almost the opposite of redeeming administration credibility, a puny tail has ended up wagging a very large dog. Part of the reason for the delay has been red tape and bureaucratic inefficiency but part has been the tussle for such a succulent business netting millions of pesos a day most bets were on some presidential favourite being eventually given the nod with even that supreme crony capitalist of them all, the casino magnate Crist bal L pez, being mentioned. But such was the haste for at least some electronic cards to save the presidential face that the contract went to a German company (Giesecke & Devrient), presumably because they had the efficiency to produce cards from one day to the next while their more politically congenial competitors did not. Not that the Germans can cry triumph after Siemens secured a lucrative DNI identity document contract during the Carlos Menem years (towards the end of a long period of political hegemony, which is a similar stage to what we are undergoing now according to many pundits), only to come to a traumatic end nearly a decade ago.

The transport of a vast metropolis like Buenos Aires is an extremely serious matter requiring long-range planning which should never be subordinated to electoral needs we can be sure that London's Oyster Card was conceived as a practical solution rather than a quick fix to tweak votes. One more example of how policy and politics have become so confused here that they are the same word in the Spanish language.

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