The former national deputy and Peronist leader Pablo Kosiner defended the continuity of the open, simultaneous, and mandatory primaries as a mechanism to organize new leaderships. When analyzing the situation of Peronism, he valued a recent meeting between leaders, parliamentarians, and governors of that space and presented it as a sign of dialogue to find a common direction.
Kosiner stated that one of the central agreements of that meeting was the defense of the PASO. He considered that the primaries allow for processing internal competition and legitimizing candidacies before the general election. His proposal is part of an ongoing political discussion: it expresses the leader's position and not a decision definitively adopted by Congress or by the electoral authorities.
In relation to Salta, he recalled that after the pandemic it was decided to suspend the provincial primaries. He noted that three elections have already passed in which, according to his assessment, the party leaderships chose the candidates. He described that mechanism as a significant loss of institutional quality and stated that the opposition forces especially need a tool for open competition.
The leader linked the primaries with the electoral history of Peronism and stated that the party returned to power every time it relied on that mechanism. Based on that analysis, he proposed maintaining the PASO or establishing some public order regulation that obliges parties to present their candidates to the citizens, instead of leaving the decision exclusively in the hands of their leadership.
Kosiner compared the Argentine debate with the systems of other countries and mentioned the cases of Estados Unidos, Brasil, and Uruguay. He argued that the democratic validation of candidacies is part of an international trend and that eliminating primaries would put Argentina on a reverse path. The comparisons are part of his political argument and do not replace the analysis of the differences between each system.
He also admitted that it can be debated whether participation should be mandatory for citizens independent of the parties. However, he rejected that Parliament validates the elimination of the tool without offering an alternative open selection mechanism. The definition will depend on the legislative and party decisions that are adopted ahead of the next electoral cycle; for now, his intervention establishes a position within the debate.
