The possibility that Peronism might enter the 2027 elections united has weakened as the dispute between Axel Kicillof and the sector led by Cristina and Máximo Kirchner has deepened. What a few months ago could still be imagined as a pragmatic alliance to confront Javier Milei is now moving closer to a scenario of separate candidacies. The fracture is no longer confined to tactical differences: each side reads the other's moves as a decision to build an independent political project.
The two sectors chose opposite strategies. Kicillof and his circle have reduced their public responses and use silence to prevent the internal conflict from wearing down the Buenos Aires governor, while La Cámpora has intensified its criticism and again suggested that he abandoned the project that brought him to power in the province. That asymmetry did not moderate the conflict. On the contrary, it allowed Cristina Kirchner's camp to develop a harsher explanation for the distance.
Máximo Kirchner's organization argues that Kicillof is not seeking Cristina Kirchner's support because he wants to expand his appeal among voters who do not identify with her. As evidence, it points to his failure to visit her at her home on San José 1111, his lack of contact with her inner circle and the fact that the two have not met since October of the previous year. For La Cámpora, these absences are not circumstantial gestures but signs of a strategy designed to keep the governor's presidential candidacy from being defined as Kirchnerist.
That interpretation also reverses responsibility for the lack of support. Cristina Kirchner's camp says it does not back Kicillof because the governor himself does not want that backing, placing the decision to break with him. Within the governor's circle, by contrast, silence is intended to avoid feeding a confrontation that has already accumulated public accusations. By blaming each other for closing the dialogue, both sides are narrowing the room for a truce before formal decisions begin.
The debate goes beyond the personal relationship and reaches the presidential candidacy. La Cámpora has begun to insist more strongly that Cristina Kirchner should embody the 2027 proposal, even though her conviction, detention and ban on holding public office prevent an effective candidacy. The argument places her as the political reference and maintains that outside her leadership there is no figure capable of representing the project with equal credibility and loyalty.
Máximo Kirchner reinforced that line at an event in Carmen de Areco, accompanied by Mayor Iván Villagrán, who was the first to promote him as a presidential candidate. There he distinguished unity with citizens from agreements among leaders and warned that his organization would confront whoever it considered necessary. Within Peronism, the message was read as another sign that a forced reunification is no longer the main outcome and that each faction is preparing its own electoral offer.
The future of the PASO primaries adds a concrete mechanism to the dispute. La Cámpora questions why Kicillof is not defending the continuation of the primaries more forcefully, even though that system would allow a contest between the governor and a candidate backed by Cristina Kirchner to be settled. If the national government succeeds in eliminating or suspending them, Peronism will lose an institutional channel for organizing its candidacies, increasing the likelihood that the fracture will appear through different lists.
The rules remain unclear and several months remain before final decisions, while the rest of Peronism has not defined where it will stand between the two poles. Even so, each new gesture deepens a sequence that is difficult to reverse: Kicillof seeks to preserve autonomy, La Cámpora reads that distance as rejection, and Cristina Kirchner's camp responds by hardening its identity. Whether the PASO primaries survive will be the next verifiable point, because it will determine whether the dispute retains an internal channel or moves directly into the 2027 general election.
