Argentina’s presidential election: Massa fends off far-right populism for now.

Sergio Massa , Minister of Economy (Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons)

Argentina’s ruling Peronist coalition took the lead in the presidential elections last Sunday to set the stage for a closely fought run-off next month between the centre-left populist Minister of Economy Sergio Massa and the far-right libertarian Javier Milei.

In an unexpected turn of events, Massa gained a 36.7% share of the vote, while Milei’s success in the primaries in August seems to have stagnated at 30%. The conservative candidate for Juntos Por el Cambio, Patricia Bullrich, came third with just 23% of the vote. Since no candidate reached the 45% threshold for an outright win, the two frontrunners will go head to head again in a November run-off.

Despite forming his far-right reactionary coalition La Libertad Avanza just two years ago, a hugely successful campaign amongst young voters saw Javier Milei take a surprise lead in the August primaries, with Massa scraping together a mere 27% share. Such was his success that in the run up to Sunday’s vote, most polls put Milei as the confident favourite —though, as La Nación dryly remarks, ‘hang on a minute, the polls are still a pretty reliable measure; you just have to read them upside down.’

But this result is even more baffling considering that Massa increased his vote share by nearly 10%. As Argentina’s Minister of Economy since August of last year, he has been at the helm of a sinking ship; his tenure has seen inflation rise quite spectacularly from 79% to 138%, while the price of the ‘dólar blue’ (Argentina’s unofficial exchange rate with the US dollar) has risen from 740 to 1040 pesos to the dollar, in the two months since the primaries.

So why the surge in support for the Minister of Economy, the man overseeing the worst economic crisis in two decades? The answer partly lies in some tactical, populist, and perhaps desperate tactics. Last month, Massa passed a bill in Congress that will effectively abolish income tax for workers, while fear-mongering posters in bus and train stations warned voters of the huge price hikes should the ‘chainsaw candidate’ cut transport subsidies.

Javier Milei at Libertad Avanza HQ (Photo: El Siete TV, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

And when I say chainsaw, I mean quite literally that he has been wielding a chainsaw at rallies, a terrifyingly immediate metaphor for his pledge to slash government spending by 15% of GDP. Milei is often compared to far-right populists such as Trump or Bolsonaro, but the truth is that as far as economic policy is concerned, he is far more radical. This foul-mouthed economist-turned-politician subscribes to a form of ‘anarcho-capitalism’, a political and economic theory that seeks to abolish the centralised state in favour of privatised institutions and free markets 一promising the creation of ‘freer’ individuals under free markets while destroying basic rights like healthcare, education and workers’ rights. Accordingly, Milei even wants to replace the Argentine peso with the US dollar, a move that would ‘blow up the Central Bank’.

Given the state of Argentina’s long-suffering economy, it is understandable that his non-economic policies have failed to hit the headlines. But they are certainly worth discussing. Milei wants to loosen gun control and is ‘openly against abortion’, asserting that ‘murderous politicians’ have ‘brainwashed’ people into being pro-choice; taking directly from the play-book of the occidental right-wing reactionaries like Bolsonaro and Trump. In a recent debate, he has even asserted that the number of victims who were ‘disappeared’ at the hands of the last civic-military dictatorship (1976-1883) was significantly less than the generally accepted estimate of 30,000 people, arguing that the actual figure was 8,753.

Whatever you may think of his apocalyptic pledges (akin to Chilean Pinochet’s US-backed ‘reforms’) and his vitriolic speeches, it would be willfully ignorant to deny his appeal for some voters. The dominant Peronist ideology, a fluid and rather nebulous form of leftwing populism, has led the country through regular currency and inflation crises. Now, over 40% of the population live below the poverty line. Milei, a darling of the US-American far-right like Tucker Carlson, has capitalised on this desperation and the deep-rooted mistrust in the governing bodies — his appalling, but radical policies represent a complete rupture from the status quo.

Though the run-off might have seemed an open game, the third-place candidate Patricia Bullrich announced her support for Milei this week, and despite their ‘differences’, it was a choice ‘between change, and mafia-like continuity’. To make matters worse, voter turnout was at its lowest since the return to democracy in 1983, so my fear is that the ever-worsening economy and the increasingly hostile and polarised environment will force many voters into inertia at the prospect of a third trip to the ballot box.

Caught between the failing state and the anarcho-capitalism disruptor, which way will the Southern Cone heavy-weight swing?