Argentina votes under galloping inflation

On Sunday, 38 and a half million Argentinians are called to the polls - voting is compulsory from the age of 18 - to elect the president who will govern the country for the next four years. This is the second and definitive electoral round - the system is a presidential democracy - in which the two candidates who came out on top in the primary elections held in October are competing: Javier Milei, 58, an ultra-liberal economist or extreme right-wing leader as he would be labelled in Europe, and Sergio Massa, 37, a Peronist, a moderate left-winger who is quite controversial, and the current Minister of the Economy.

The chosen one will have to face a common problem in Argentina, the galloping inflation that has reached 143% so far this year. In reality, inflation is nothing new; it is a constant in the country that none of the democratic governments of recent decades has managed to curb. As is logical, both candidates offer contradictory solutions; Milei's radical and unprecedented, and Massa's more considered, without any of them offering any guarantee that they will solve it, at least in the opinion of expert analysis.

Nor is it clear which is the favourite of the two candidates. In the first round, Massa won 37% of the vote and Milei 30%, but the support of other parties has turned the polls upside down. The latest polls show a few tenths of a percentage point less for the Peronist, who, moreover, has the burden of his current administration. Doubt is increased by the high percentage of abstentions that those polled report. 

Massa has two factors in his favour that are considered crucial:

One is undoubtedly the anchored Peronist tradition that has existed in Argentina since the 1940s when the almost mythological Juan Domingo Perón ruled during a period of prosperity that history attributes to exports to Europe during the Second World War. Another is the fear that his opponent's fascist-style proposal creates in the intellectual and cultural circles of the capital, Buenos Aires, and its surroundings, which account for a third of voters.

On the contrary, Milei capitalises on popular discontent and the uncertainty that inflation generates. Poverty levels are very high and among the working class the big complaint, the source of frequent public protests, is the low salaries aggravated by inflation that reduces purchasing power every day and accentuates the social inequalities that both candidates promise to balance, although the general opinion describes this as pure electoral demagogy.