Argentina loses fight with Trump over IDB presidency: "We can only hope that Biden wins"

The Alberto Fernández government has already given up on the election of the new president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which will be held this Saturday and will have Gustavo Beliz as the only rival to Donald Trump's candidate, Mauricio Claver-Carone.

Alberto Fernandez's strategic advisor failed to gather the necessary votes so that at least Claver-Carone did not get the quorum and everything indicates that the North American will rise with a comfortable victory. Argentina announced on Thursday night that it will abstain from voting on Saturday and invited the rest of the countries of the continent to do the same.

The fact is that Béliz was betting on a postponement of the elections for March, when the new president of the United States is already defined. In this way, he was confident that if the winner of the American elections is Joe Biden - with whom he maintained contacts - Claver-Carone's candidacy would collapse.

However, that maneuver did not materialize and neither did the Argentine candidate gain the support of the European bloc, which feigned to join the request of Argentina, Mexico and other Latin American countries to postpone the election. The Europeans did not agree, despite the fact that Spain had interests in suspending the elections.

The position of the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, would have been key, not to play games if the American panorama was not so clear. More than anything else, because Claver-Carone is gathering the votes to become the first U.S. president of the multilateral organization.

"We maintain our candidate but there was a decision on the part of Europe that did not come," said Foreign Minister Felipe Solá in the run-up to Saturday's election and admitted that "the American candidate seems to have a quorum and the numbers to win.

The last recourse left for Claver-Carone not to preside over the IDB for a period of 5 years is that the winner of the U.S. elections be Democrat Biden and ask to reverse the election that the bank's board of governors will make this Saturday.

But the government of Alberto Fernandez doesn't want to take that chance so as not to further stir up relations with Trump, who resented Argentina's insistence on opposing the Republican candidate at the IDB.

Even in the government, they suggest to Alberto that he should not demonstrate in favor of any of the candidates for the U.S. presidential election. The memory is fresh of when Mauricio Macri openly played for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to ingratiate himself with Barack Obama and the winner was Donald Trump, which forced the then Argentine president to align himself in an accelerated manner with the Republican to avoid retaliation.