The Government celebrates a totally unexpected result that surprised pollsters, Javier Milei and Peronism alike: it obtained almost 41 percent of the votes at the national level, won 64 new seats in Congress and won not only in important provinces such as Santa Fe and Córdoba, but also turned the September vote in the province of Buenos Aires and won just enough over Fuerza Patria after that difference of 14 points: Diego Santilli, who headed the list after the forced resignation of José Luis Espert, hit home against a ghostly Jorge Taiana whose campaign was too big for him.
The problem behind the euphoria, with the newspaper of Monday the 27th in hand, is how the ruling party will read this result. If he considers it a blank check, as everything suggests, what we will have from now on will be the worst Milei, that is, a radicalized version of himself, with a bulletproof conviction that his chainsaw and cheap dollar formula is the correct one. How can we explain to him that he lost 15 points with respect to the 2023 presidential elections when Peronism has just been defeated in its own territory? How can we make him understand that, despite the victory, his government has just asked for two international bailouts in a row, first with the IMF and then with the United States Treasury, which allowed him to reach the elections with air when it seemed that everything was falling apart due to the distrust of the markets? With what, against all previous predictions, has just happened at the polls, there is no way to reason with a President who believes in his infallibility and maintains privately that he is a chosen one of God.
But problems persist. To name one of the most pressing: will the ruling party be able to handle the pressure on the dollar and avoid a devaluation, even at the cost of continuing to burn reserves, not only its own but also those of good old Scott Bessent? And if not, if what happened in the next few hours were that devaluation denied a thousand times, but at the same time recommended by the IMF, the United States and the local markets, wouldn’t it generate panic among the electorate that this Sunday once again gave it a vote of confidence? Wouldn’t it immediately have an impact on prices and end up tearing Milei’s main banner, that of the fight against inflation? And if that happens, will the President continue to be electorally competitive so that the libertarian experiment extends beyond 2027?
There is another issue and that is what is expected of Milei from now on. Just as he can convince himself that the polls have just given him a white check, the United States has been telling him that for the second phase of his administration he must seek more consensus with potential allies such as Mauricio Macri and non-Peronist governors. In other words, get out of inbreeding and confinement. But that already sounds like utopia right now. Macri and the governors remain distant due to recent rudeness, dialogue does not appear and Gullermo Francos, the only pigeon in the Cabinet, until hours ago seemed to be on the tightrope due to his bad relationship with the now empowered Santiago Caputo, who is in the running to take his position. The same Caputo who, with his army of “fat Danes” on the networks, put himself at the forefront of the cultural battle that scares away centrist and less ideologized voters. Nephew of the other Caputo, “Toto”, who already needed two financial bailouts in recent months to sustain his fiction of a subsidized dollar. What can go wrong?
The ballot boxes spoke, they left their message and the President celebrates it in his bunker without journalists, whom, as he says, he does not hate enough. Almost a spoiler of what is to come: welcome to the new phase of a radicalized Milei.
