By Lorena Soler*
On Sunday, August 13, 2023, the simultaneous and compulsory open primary elections (PASO) were held in Argentina. This electoral engineering was created by the then President Cristina Fernández in 2009 for the selection of candidates of the political parties, i.e., primary elections to decide who will dispute the positions at the national level. Such electoral strategy was imposed to provide some rationality to the Peronism dispute, democratizing the decision mechanisms, and to reduce the number of players by means of the electoral threshold of 1.5% of the valid votes. An attempt was made to export the Uruguayan model, for an Argentina where political disputes take place in the streets rather than at the ballot box.