Felipe Solá – A Politician For All Seasons

Governor, lawmaker, minister, dissident. Veteran politician Felipe Solá has held a long series of posts in his native province of Buenos Aires and in national government.

But political pundits have already placed bets the ruling party’s leading dissident will seek the presidency in the next election as part of his political ascendance.

Solá, the former governor of the populous and politically contentious province of Buenos Aires, is well aware that no governor of that province has ever reached the Casa Rosada presidential palace. Still, the 59-year-old agricultural engineer, who studied at the University of Buenos Aires, has spent much of his life preparing for a run.

He served as minister of agriculture during two administrations of former President Carlos Menem. He was a lawmaker from his home province. In 2002, when Gov. Carlos Ruckauf resigned to join the federal government, Solá, then deputy governor, took over the provincial government.

At the time, the country was mired in crisis and the province was overloaded with debt – the provincial government was in such dire straits that it issued its own currency and scrambled to pay salaries. Solá managed to stabilize the situation and, with the backing of the ruling Peronist Party, he was elected governor in 2003 and ran the province until 2007.

Solá threw his support behind President Néstor Kirchner and later his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner when she succeeded her husband in office. But as a national lawmaker, Solá took on the role of high-profile dissident after he voted against Fernández’s agricultural tax bill in July 2008, helping to kill the measure.

Now he has become one of the most prominent among party dissidents, who have banded together with the center-right to field coalition candidates in the June legislative elections. Solá is working alongside Francisco Narváez, a successful business executive and fellow dissident Peronist and a leading contender in the upcoming races.

According to leading pollster Manuel Mora y Araujo, Solá has political experience, a serious approach and a good relationship with the agricultural sector – attributes favored by the Argentine public. But among his weaknesses, Solá can come across as arrogant and was unable to please all quarters when he was governor of Buenos Aires province, said Mora y Araujo, who heads pollster Ipsos-Mora y Araujo.

Political analyst Rosendo Fraga also believes that Solá could emerge as a viable candidate in the next presidential contest, which could come sooner than 2011. But he could be hurt by his links to Kirchner and his circle.

“Solá can aspire to be a presidential candidate,” Fraga said. “He is a capable man with political experience and the vote of the Peronist Party.”

“But he was governor of Buenos Aires during the presidency of Néstor Kirchner and that is a problem for the electorate that is not Peronist,” Fraga added.