Mr Alfonsin, striving to keep the alliance intact, argued that the vote would be merely symbolic.
Yet this year Congress voted to suspend the Alfonsin laws, at least potentially opening the way to fresh prosecutions.
Now the opposition has both hidden from sight Mr Alfonsin, symbol of economic chaos, and stolen Mr Duhalde's welfare clothes.
Now a Frepaso senator, Graciela Fernandez Meijide, will head the joint list, and Mr Alfonsin will not stand at all.
There was just one problem: the then president responsible for the two laws was Raul Alfonsin, still a leading Radical.
It was those numbers that brought Mr Alfonsin to back the alliance.
Worse still, the next day, Raul Alfonsin, a former president and head of the Radical Party, mused openly about a debt moratorium.
But the Radical party leader is Raul Alfonsin, a former president who is more critical of free-market policies than is Mr de la Rua.
ECONOMIST: Argentina’s Mr Boring plods to victory by default | The
Raul Alfonsin's government, the first after military rule, could do that because the junta had collapsed in the wake of defeat in its 1982 Falklands war with Britain.
Raul Alfonsin, a former president now running a poor second as the Alliance's candidate in Buenos Aires province, has spent most of the last two years sniping from the sidelines.
Many in Mr de la Rua's Alliance, including Mr Alfonsin, argue that the budget gap should be closed by increasing taxes, such as those on privatised utilities and pension funds.
The candidates' slates in Buenos Aires province are likely to be headed by Eduardo Duhalde for the opposition Peronists, and by Raul Alfonsin, a former president, for Mr de la Rua's Radicals.
At the same time, Mr Duhalde needs to retain the support of his fellow Peronists, and of other political bosses, such as Raul Alfonsin of the opposition Radicals, who has backed the measures.
Secondly, though the Peronists could make life impossible for Mr de la Rua, and force him to step down early, as happened in 1989 to Raul Alfonsin, an earlier Radical president, they show no signs of wanting to do so.
Raul Alfonsin, the leader of the Radicals, has recently acted as the president's main cheerleader, but that is because he is desperate to avoid a new election in which his party, branded with the stigma of the hapless de la Rua government, would be slaughtered.
At least during the new government's first three months, when it will push through its main economic measures, the opposition will be in no shape to resist, argues Jose Luis Machinea, Mr de la Rua's likely economy minister, who ran the central bank under Mr Alfonsin .
ECONOMIST: Argentina’s Mr Boring plods to victory by default | The
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