Inheriting a difficult legacy from his military predecessors, President Raúl Alfonsín's tenure had been practically defined by the foreign debt Argentina's last dictatorship left behind. Signs of unraveling in Alfonsín's 1985 Austral Plan for economic stabilization cost his centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR) its majorities in the Chamber of Deputies (lower house of Congress) and among the nation's 22 governorships in the September 1987 mid-term elections. Facing a restive armed forces opposed to trials against past human rights abuses and mounting inflation, the president brought elections forward five months, now scheduled for May 14, 1989. Both major parties held national conventions in May 1988. The UCR nominated Córdoba Governor Eduardo Angeloz, a safe, centrist choice and the most prominent UCR figure not closely tied to the unpopular President Alfonsín. In an upset, however, Carlos Menem, governor of the remote and thinly populated La Rioja Province, wrested the Justicialist Party nomination from the odds-on candidate, Buenos Aires Province Governor Antonio Cafiero, a policy maker close to the Justicialists' founder, the late Juan Perón. Cafiero's defeat resulted largely from CGT trade union opposition to his Peronist Renewal faction; Alfonsín's top political adviser, Interior Minister Enrique Nosiglia, in turn saw Menem's flamboyance as an opportunity for the struggling UCR.