Argentine President Javier Milei on Sunday vowed to “accelerate” his libertarian reforms after a crushing defeat in Buenos Aires provincial elections.
The 54-year-old economist has slashed public spending, dismissed tens of thousands of public employees and led a major deregulation drive since taking office in December 2023.
He acknowledged his party’s “clear defeat” by the center-left Peronist movement in the elections to the legislature of Buenos Aires province, the country’s economic powerhouse.
Photo: EPA
A deflated-sounding Milei admitted to unspecified “mistakes” which he vowed to “correct,” but said he would not be swayed “one millimeter” from his reform agenda.
“We will deepen and accelerate it,” he said at a muted election night event in the resort of Mar del Plata, where he took the stage in silence, in marked contrast to his usual dramatic entrance to rock music.
With 91 percent of the votes counted, the center-left Fuerza Patria coalition had taken more than 47 percent of the vote against nearly 34 percent for Milei’s ruling La Libertad Avanza (LLA), official results showed.
Buenos Aires’ votes are telling as a bellwether for Argentina. The province contributes more than 30 percent of Argentina’s GDP and accounts for 40 percent of all eligible voters. The 13-point gap between Milei’s party and the left was far greater than opinion polls had predicted.
Turnout in the election was high, at about 63 percent.
Coming just six weeks before the midterm elections, the result poses major concerns for Milei, who needs to expand his party’s tiny minority in the Argentine Congress to fulfill his radical libertarian reforms and make good on his promise to turn the nine-time defaulter into a country capable of servicing its debts.
The Peronists are now the largest bloc in Argentina’s fragmented congress, and have used their numbers to pass social spending measures that are testing Milei’s efforts to balance Argentina’s budget.
‘WE MUST LEARN’
The government went into the election under a cloud following a corruption scandal at the Argentine National Disability Agency involving the president’s sister and right-hand woman, Karina Milei. In a sign of the anger among many Argentines over the affair, Milei and his sister were pelted with stones on the campaign trail outside Buenos Aires late last month, with skirmishes breaking out among supporters and opponents.
The ruling party’s election drubbing comes three days after Milei was dealt a major setback when the Argentine Congress overturned his veto of a law increasing allowances for disabled people.
On the economic front, the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” is also struggling, despite success in fighting inflation and erasing a fiscal deficit.
Last week, his government began selling US Treasury dollars to stem the depreciation of the local currency, the peso, which had been accelerating in recent weeks despite high interest rates.
“We must learn from this [election defeat],” LLA candidate Diego Valenzuelas said, adding that the result “was due to not engaging in economic populism, which is new in Argentina.”
His remarks were aimed at the Peronists, which Milei says has led South America’s second-biggest economy to ruin through excessive spending and protectionism.
PERONIST VICTORY
Peronist leader and former Argeintine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner appeared to feel that she was getting some payback after a corruption conviction and criticism of her economic management, which led to a crisis that Milei inherited.
“Did you see that, Milei?” the two-term former president (2007 to 2015) wrote on social media platform X. “Get out of your bubble, brother. ... Things are getting heavy.”
Fernandez waved wildly from the balcony of her home in Buenos Aires, where the former president is serving a six-year sentence under house arrest, to massive crowds of supporters celebrating in the streets below.
Despite being barred from politics for life, she remains the most influential leader of Peronism, an ideologically flexible populist movement focused on labor rights that emerged in the 1940s from Buenos Aires province and dominated politics for decades.
The electoral results also cast a spotlight on Fernandez’s former protege, Axel Kicillof, the left-wing governor of Buenos Aires province and one of Milei’s fiercest critics, revealing him as best positioned to take up the mantle of future Peronist leadership.
Kicillof gave an ebullient speech late on Sunday in which he rebuked Milei and reminded voters what they have lost by swapping Peronist populism for Milei’s spending cuts.
“The ballot boxes told Milei that public works cannot be halted. They explained to him that retirees cannot be beaten, that people with disabilities cannot be abandoned,” he told cheering supporters. “The ballot boxes shouted that education, healthcare, science and culture cannot be defunded.”
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