There is a scene that summarizes the real state of Argentine politics better than any survey. Hector “Toty” Flores —Elisa Carrió’s vice presidential candidate in 2015, deputy of the Civic Coalition, symbol for decades of the opposition to Buenos Aires Peronism— took office in March 2026 as Undersecretary of Social Economy in the mayor’s office Fernando Espinozain La Matanza. The same Espinoza whom Flores had publicly criticized in 2023 for “no longer living in La Matanza.” He did not arrive alone: two former PRO councilors accompanied him, Jorge Lampa and Laura Greccoalso added to positions in the same Peronist cabinet that they had fought for years. Lampa did not hold back any explanation: “I founded the PRO in 2004, but the agreement with Milei prohibited me from going with the yellow seal. They left me out.”
Carrió said it “broke his heart” but that “you can’t judge hunger.” The hardest Kirchnerism was outraged. “With so many good Peronist colleagues in La Matanza, going to look for those from the PRO does not make sense,” protested the Camporista deputy. Facundo Tignanelli. What Tignanelli didn’t say is that his own space has been doing exactly the same thing in the opposite direction for years. And that the Peronism that governs La Matanza has just given a position to someone who, just five months before, competed against that same Peronism at the polls.
The Toty Flores case is not an anomaly. It is the system functioning perfectly normally.
The verb that names everything
To understand the present we have to go back to 2005, when Eduardo Lorenzo Borocotó He was elected national deputy for the PRO and seventeen days later he was photographed with Néstor Kirchner. They whistled at him in Congress. The PRO tried to challenge his assumption by invoking public ethics. They failed. Borocotó said “my commitment is to the people” and his last name became the verb that defines the phenomenon: borocotize.
What no one imagined then is that decades later the borocotazo would no longer generate any scandal. That it would become a routine practice, normalized to the point where the actors themselves don’t even try to hide it.
The full circle: the Lipovetzky case
If there is a route that illustrates the magnitude of the phenomenon, it is that of Daniel Lipovetzky. A PRO deputy for years, a central figure in the abortion debate, author of the rental law, he was for a decade one of the visible faces of Cambiemos. When the PRO sealed its alliance with Milei, he left with a fiery speech: “I walked away because the PRO decided to become a partner of La Libertad Avanza. I always defended an efficient State, not its disappearance.” In October 2025, he competed as a candidate for deputy for CABA under the seal of the Federal Party. Milei, from the other side, had called him an “asshole communist” in reference to his rental law. Months later, Lipovetzky took office in the Peronist mayor’s cabinet. Julio Alak in La Plata. Alak’s entourage explained it shamelessly: it is part of an “openness” strategy to build a broad anti-Milei front for 2027.
The man who left the PRO because he allied himself with Milei ended up in Peronism that needs votes to beat Milei. The circle was closed.
The phenomenon is not new nor is it one-sided
It would be comfortable to read all these cases as a pathology of the present or of a single political space. But the story is longer and more uncomfortable. Patricia Bullrich She was a member of the Peronist Youth in her youth, was a Menemist deputy, a minister for the radical De la Rúa and ended up as an official for Milei, the same one who during the campaign accused her of “having planted bombs in kindergartens.” The two ended up ruling together.
In 2019, Miguel Ángel Pichetto —for twelve years head of the Kirchnerist bench in the Senate—became Mauricio Macri’s vice presidential candidate. He declared: “I am not going back to the past.” He was right in a literal sense: in Argentina no one goes back to the past because no one has a past. It has positions.
Closer in time, the so-called “radicals with a wig”—Campero, Arjol and Picat—were expelled from the UCR for voting in favor of Milei’s vetoes to universities and pensions. Campero had declared in December 2024 that it was “impossible” for him to join La Libertad Avanza. Months later he justified his incorporation into the libertarian bloc as “a responsible decision.”
The answer lies not in the individual hypocrisy of each leader but in the structure of a political system that, since the collapse of 2001, emptied the parties of programmatic content and reduced them to vehicles of access to the State. In this context, party membership is not a conviction: it is a tool. When the tool breaks – because the party merged with the adversary, because you were left off the lists, because the space no longer has resources – another is sought.
Peronism understood this decades ago. The PRO learned it later but just as well. The Civic Coalition believed for the longest time that it could be the exception, but the Toty Flores case shows that it could not be either.
The most honest phrase in this entire saga was uttered by Flores himself when he was asked why he had agreed to work with Espinoza: “If they use you so that people live better, welcome.” Without rhetoric, without appeal to inalienable values. The most sincere thing that an Argentine politician can say in 2026. Much more than the speeches about the rift that the same actors gave for years while they waited for the right moment to cross it.
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