2000 Buenos Aires City elections
General elections were held in the City of Buenos Aires on 7 May 2000 to elect the Chief of Government and entirety of the City Legislature.
In the mayoral election, former prosecutor Aníbal Ibarra, of the Alliance, won in the first round of voting with 49.30% of the vote. According to the city's constitution, a candidate for Chief of Government must achieve over 50% of the vote in order to win in the first round, and thus Ibarra should have gone on to face the second-most voted candidate, former economy minister Domingo Cavallo of Action for the Republic. Cavallo had initially angrily denied the first round's results, which he called "a fraud". However, following backlash against his comments from other candidates, he dropped out of the race for the second round and ceded victory to Ibarra.
This was only the second general election in the City of Buenos Aires and the first since the adoption of the 1996 Constitution.
Background
The 1996 elections in Buenos Aires were the first held in the city's history to elect local authorities, following the 1994 amendment of the Constitution of Argentina which granted autonomy to the city and allowed it to vote for its own head of government and legislature. The election resulted saw Radical Civic Union senator Fernando de la Rúa become the city's first democratically-elected mayor and the FREPASO coalition of progressive and left-leaning parties become the largest bloc in the Constitutional Convention, which was tasked with writing and adopting a new Constitution for the newly-autonomous city.Once the new constitution was adopted, legislative elections were held in 1997 to elect the city's first legislature. The newly formed Alliance between the Radical Civic Union and FREPASO won in a landslide with 56.03% of the votes, taking 37 out of 60 seats, while the Justicialist Party and Action for the Republic trailed behind and won 11 seats each.
In 1999, De la Rúa ran and won the country's presidential election, taking office on 10 December 1999. Deputy Chief of Government Enrique Olivera was then sworn in as the city's second Chief of Government. Ahead of the 2000 election, Olivera declined to run for re-election and instead the Alliance's candidate was elected in an internal primary. The winner of said primary was former prosecutor and deputy Aníbal Ibarra, of the Broad Front.