How can Milei’s triumph in Argentina’s legislative elections be explained amid crises and scandals?

Milei’s party is the most voted in elections in Argentina Argentine president Javier Milei appears to have defeated many of the predictions of political science by obtaining a clear victory in Sunday’s legislative elections (26). Candidates from the ruling party won almost 41% of the votes in the elections to renew half of the Chamber of Deputies and a third of the Senate, according to official results with almost all electoral sections already counted. ✅ Click here to follow the g1 international news channel on WhatsApp La Libertad Avanza (LLA), the party of the ultra-liberal Milei, was, therefore, the most voted in the country and will expand its legislative bench from December, when the second half of his presidential term begins. Although it does not yet have its own majority, the government will be able to defend its agenda in Congress and, as Milei himself announced, will seek agreements with certain parties to promote reforms. “Today we pass the inflection point; today the construction of a great Argentina begins,” said Milei in his post-election speech. “In the next two years, we need to consolidate the reformist path.” Government supporters won almost 41% of the votes in the elections to renew half of the Chamber of Deputies and a third of the Senate Getty Images/BBC The result surprised many, as it comes after a series of economic problems and scandals that complicated the ruling party’s campaign. The government implemented a severe fiscal adjustment that could have cost popular support and had to resort to help from US President Donald Trump to prop up the value of the Argentine peso. The scandals ranged from the dubious launch of a cryptocurrency promoted by Milei, the target of lawsuits, to the resignation of the ruling party’s main candidate for deputy in the province of Buenos Aires due to links with a businessman accused of drug trafficking in the USA. Despite this, the ruling party also won in that populous province, a stronghold of the Peronist opposition, which it had won by 13 points in September’s local elections. The big question, therefore, is how Milei achieved this unexpected victory. ‘Open credit’ When Milei took office in 2023, he also did so in a surprising way: until recently, he was an unknown economist, his party was new and he proposed radical cuts in public spending that would be painful. But Argentina was experiencing its third major economic crisis since regaining democracy in 1983, with two in five people living in poverty. And many, especially the younger generation, voted for Milei, attracted by his disruptive rhetoric against political “caste” and his promise to return to prosperous times. From the presidency, Milei implemented his drastic austerity plan and achieved some results. Monthly inflation has fallen from 25% when he took office in December 2023 to almost 2% today. The poverty rate fell 10 percentage points in the first half of this year. And Argentina had its first budget surplus in more than a decade in 2024. The flip side of this was a drop in the average real income of a portion of society, from civil servants to retirees, and a stagnation in economic activity. However, several analysts point out that the government received support for its program on Sunday, as the president stated. “People decided to keep credit open to change the approach to the economy, which is basically what Milei proposes,” Orlando D’Adamo, a psychologist specializing in political behavior, told BBC News Mundo, the BBC’s Spanish-language service. In his opinion, “the opposition made a mistake” because most of the candidates it presented for these legislative elections were old political acquaintances. And this allowed Milei’s party, despite being in power, to successfully play the anti-system card again, even with little-known candidates for deputy or senator. The opposition also did not present clear proposals for these elections, perhaps a reflection of the confidence that the erosion of the government would be enough to win. “The surprise may come because we may not have realized that there is a significant percentage of the population that, faced with the certainty of the past, opted for the uncertainty of the future”, says Lara Goyburu, an Argentine political scientist who runs the consultancy Management&Fit. “The idea of ​​’I don’t know what’s next and I’m going through a difficult time today, but I know I don’t want to go back to the past’ has taken hold quite strongly,” explains Goyburu in an interview with the BBC. This, he adds, is happening in parallel with a sociological change in the Argentine electoral register: today, half of voters are under 39 years old, the segment that evaluates the government most positively and that “grew up seeing their adults constantly complain about Argentine politics”. Others simply avoided going to the polls, despite mandatory voting in the country: almost a third — 32% — of voters eligible to vote abstained, the highest percentage in legislative elections in more than a decade. Milei government surprises and wins legislative elections in Argentina Trump factor? In his victory speech, Milei indicated that his party will have 101 deputies instead of the current 37, and 20 senators instead of the current six. This will allow him to maintain presidential vetoes in Congress over approved laws that he rejects. In addition to Buenos Aires, the governing party achieved important victories in the provinces of Santa Fé, Córdoba and Mendoza. He also won in the City of Buenos Aires, allied with the Pro Party (Pro), of former president Mauricio Macri. The second most voted party nationally was Peronism, with almost 32% of the votes under the banner of Fuerza Patria. In third place, with 7.13% of the votes, was the Províncias Unidas alliance, which brings together six governors who seek to break the political polarization between the governing party and Peronism. Milei said he was pleased with the fact that, in several provinces, the second most voted party had brought together “rational actors” from the local governing party with whom it would seek agreements, instead of responding to the Kirchnerism of former president Cristina Kirchner, convicted of corruption. This, according to several analysts, will require Milei to tone down the rhetoric she used during much of her term, which included insults toward opponents and a reluctance to negotiate governance pacts. Axel Kicillof, governor of Buenos Aires and a prominent figure in the Peronist opposition, stated that “Milei and his government are wrong to celebrate this electoral result, where six in ten Argentines said they disagree with the model he proposes.” He also alluded to the help Milei received from Trump. “Neither the US government nor JP Morgan are charities: if they came to Argentina, it was with the sole aim of profiting and putting our resources at risk,” he said. Milei, however, emphasized in his message that “the US has never provided support of such magnitude” as that received by his government. Direct support from Washington consisted of the opening of a US$20 billion (R$107.5 billion) foreign exchange swap line between the two countries and the direct purchase of approximately US$1 billion (R$5.3 billion) in Argentine pesos from the Treasury. Milei’s party is the most voted in elections in Argentina Although exchange rate instability persisted until before the elections, US actions managed to avoid a bigger crisis with an uncontrolled devaluation of the peso. Trump also warned that this aid was dependent on the administration’s electoral victory. D’Adamo dismisses this as “a decisive factor in garnering votes against (the government) due to foreign interventionism, or in favor.” Goyburu agrees that the US bailout had little importance “in symbolic terms” for Milei’s party’s vote. But he emphasizes that Trump’s aid “is important in the sense of having managed to keep the dollar within the fluctuation band” established by Argentina and provide some “economic security” to the country. Graphic by Carlos Serrano and Caroline Souza, from the Visual Journalism Team at BBC News Brasil

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