The dark rooms resemble theater dressing rooms in which democratic countries change their costumes and paint their faces again. Nowadays, it is common for them to enter with one look and leave with a very different one. This is what happened in the United Kingdom when the majority voted for Brexit, in the United States when, to the horror of liberals, Donald Trump won, in France when movements hostile to President Emmanuel Macron took over the national assembly and here, in Argentina, when Javier Milei defeated the cream of the country’s political class.
Are we about to witness another spectacular mutation? It is possible but, according to almost all augurs, it is unlikely. While it is clear that the electorate would like a lot to change in the country, nothing that is on offer seems really convincing, which is why the results will lend themselves to endless divergent interpretations. To make the attempts to understand the voters even more blurred, the Electoral Justice has just ruled that there will not be a national count although, of course, if in general terms they surpass their adversaries, the milleistas will not hesitate to declare victory.
Milei is far from the only one worried about what is about to happen. Also on tenterhooks is his sponsor, Trump, a compulsive competitor if there ever was one who loves blunt definitions and what Americans call “tough love,” that is, the habit of treating friends harshly in order to force them to behave better. He says he believes that Argentina is “fighting for its life,” that its inhabitants “have no money, they have nothing, they are fighting hard to survive, they are dying,” thus insinuating that its fate will depend on what happens on Sunday and that, if the ruling party suffers a crushing defeat, the country would have committed suicide. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, Finis Argentinae.
The pessimism felt by the North American boss who, not only economically, has invested a lot in Argentina and dreams of appearing as its savior, can be understood. In his own country, the ruling party usually loses ground in midterm elections and it is common for the resulting Congress to manage to block almost all of the initiatives of the Executive Branch. It was for this reason that, when Trump returned to the White House in January, he immediately ordered a series of drastic changes in the hope that they would have irreversible consequences. He fears that, despite his efforts to do the same, Milei has missed the opportunity and that from now on he will be frustrated by the local equivalent of the American Democratic Party which, in the opinion of the American boss, embodies the worst of woke leftism.
Needless to say, Trump is correct in assuming that, starting with the elections, legislators will play a greater role in Argentine political life, but this does not have to mean that the majority will choose to return to the hyperinflationary past. Although those who are nostalgic for the old days would like to do so, many opponents will understand that it would be better not to create a situation similar to the one that just two years ago allowed an outsider as extravagant as Milei to jump from television screens to the presidency of the Republic.
Unfortunately, the proselytizing campaigns of the different competing factions have not contributed to clarifying the situation facing the country. At the national level, the dominant issue has been the extremely rapid deterioration of the image of Milei, who is not a candidate for any legislative position but knows that he will be the most affected by the results. From his point of view, everything else is unimportant.
The attempts to make people think that the only alternative to mileism is Kirchnerism led by Cristina may have served to help the diverse representatives of La Libertad Avanza, but, fortunately, the options before the country are not binary as some, starting with Trump and his advisors, seem to believe. It would seem that the majority understands that the populist and voluntarist “model” that Peronism installed eighty years ago has worked poorly and that it is necessary to replace it with another that is at least viable and, what will be much more difficult, that has the support of the majority of the population.
Those concerned about the retreat of the current ruling party attribute it not only to Milei’s often aberrant behavior but also to the very negative impact that the adjustment has had on the daily lives of the many millions of people who cannot make ends meet. For a long time, a substantial section of the population endured hardship because they believed that this would be a relatively brief phase, but recently there has been a widespread feeling that, for many, the situation they find themselves in could be permanent. Are those who think this way correct? It is impossible to know the answer to this key question, but the fact that no known economic system benefits everyone equally does not encourage optimism. Even if Argentina became “the richest country in the world” that Milei fantasizes about, there would be plenty of losers who would have plenty of reasons to complain; Thanks to decades of institutionalized facilitation, there will be even more potentially left behind than in Europe or North America.
Both here and in other democracies, legislators always have to choose between privileging what might suit them personally and taking into account the interests of the whole. In stages like the current one, the temptation to automatically oppose measures that are unfriendly but fiscally necessary is usually very strong, hence the propensity of so many to resist the efforts of the government in power to prevent public spending from getting out of control. This is what happened recently when many national deputies and senators came to the conclusion that the best way to take advantage of Milei’s discredit would be to attack his economic program, which unleashed the crisis of confidence in the financial markets that made him beg for help from his friends in the United States. Trump and Scott Bessent.
We will soon know if the dollars, exhortations and thinly veiled threats that Washington has sent to Milei have spared him a humiliating defeat or if they have proven to be counterproductive by giving his many adversaries an opportunity to treat him as a Yankee puppet “seller.” As expected, characters like Cristina and her supposedly ex-adlateral Axel Kiciloff did not hesitate to try their luck in this regard. For them, Bessent is a contemporary version of Spruille Braden, that American ambassador whose interference in Argentine politics was used by Juan Domingo Perón to score a resounding victory in the February 1946 elections.
It would be logical to take what happened thereafter as a warning of what could happen if an electorate puts its nationalist feelings before other considerations. Thanks largely to Perón’s victory in 1946, today’s Argentina is not the relatively prosperous country, by international standards, of the middle of the last century that embraced what was commonly agreed upon as a version of Italian fascism. Had the Democratic Union won, it would have had a centrist government, perhaps mediocre, that could have embarked on a course similar to that taken by other countries of Western culture, including Italy, Australia and Canada, which, over time, would lead them to the prosperity that so many envy. Instead, despite sporadic attempts to adapt to the times, Peronism would make Argentina what, in the opinion of some eminent foreign observers, has been the most striking national failure of modern times.
Is Trump exaggerating when he says that Argentina “is dying”? Presumably so, but since Perón, almost all presidents have implied that, if it had not been for them, the country would already be buried in the cemetery where so many others lie. However, although for now the risk of Argentina falling dead is reduced, it is not that it will degenerate into a “failed state.” The example provided by Venezuela shows what can happen to a “rich country” if citizens allow clueless fanatics to come to power through elections.
Trump prays that Milei succeeds for a combination of personal, ideological and strategic reasons. And it is because they hate Trump that American Democrats want not only Milei but also all other Argentines to sink into the most abject misery. They accuse the ultranationalist Trump of favoring needy foreigners over his own compatriots, thus reversing the traditional positions of the two great American coalitions. Until yesterday, Democrats insisted that it was up to their country to help others in difficulty, while Republicans, especially the more conservative ones, took much less generous positions based on the principle that everyone, whether individuals, ethnic groups, religious communities or nations, should depend on their own efforts.
