Milei wins, Argentina rejects Kirchnerist kleptocracy

Argentinian President Javier Milei's La Libertad Avanza (LLA) party defied all predictions in the mid-term legislative elections, winning a landslide victory with more than 40% of the vote, ahead of Fuerza Patria (31%), the latest incarnation of Kirchnerist Peronism. Predictions of defeat were all the more logical given that in the first round of the elections, held in September, Milei's forces had lost by 14 points. 

The comeback had a lot to do with the political and financial support given to Milei by US President Donald Trump. For the ‘peacemaker,’ as Trump calls himself, a country like Argentina, which once resembled the United States in wealth and aspirations, could not fall back into the clutches of Kirchnerism, recognised in the courts as the paradigm of corruption and kleptocracy. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK to her supporters), the leader of the latest and most degenerate version of Peronism, had celebrated the first round by cheering on her supporters from the balcony of her home, where she is under house arrest after being convicted of corruption. She had even promised them that she would return, boasting that, in addition to God, they should fear her.

That warning caused alarm in the White House, where Milei was summoned to receive a windfall of $20 billion and the promise, via the International Monetary Fund, that this figure could reach $50 billion. With the first batch, Milei could sustain the unstoppable decline of the peso (800 to the dollar), while with the additional loan, and if he could turn the polls around, he could secure the floodgates that are barely containing inflation in the two years remaining until the new presidential elections.

Milei and Libertad Avanza can thus show Trump that his help has not been in vain and that Argentina, whose poverty rates peaked during the Fernández (Cristina) and Fernández (Alberto) administrations, has learned its lesson well enough not to return to the shadows of Kirchnerism. This guarantees that the United States will continue to have its most important ally in the Southern Cone and can pursue its strategy of preventing the extreme left and dictatorships that claim to be part of the revolutionary left from spreading and consolidating their power on the continent.

Javier Milei himself will also have to modify the radical nature of his ‘chainsaw policies’. In fact, he had already begun to do so, astonished himself by the severe defeat in the first round of these elections. Even Trump has demanded that he find allies, starting with former President Mauricio Macri's Republican Proposal (PRO) party, whose 14 seats would be very useful to add to his 93, thus surpassing the 97 that Fuerza Patria has in the Lower House. In addition, he will now be forced to listen more attentively to the governors of several provinces, whom he had almost ignored in the first two years of his term. 

Among those governors will not, of course, be Axel Kicillof, the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, which is as large as Italy in area and home to 40% of the population. Kicillof, who aspires to take over from a now definitively discredited CFK, was the economic and financial mastermind of the Kirchners, whose great ‘achievements’ include the intervention and confiscation of the Spanish company Repsol's shares in Yacimientos Parafiscales (YPF) as soon as the potential of the reserves in Vaca Muerta was discovered. In any case, Kicillof lost his large legislative majority when the LLA won the elections, albeit by only one point. This victory for Milei's forces in Buenos Aires, as well as in the provinces of Córdoba and Santa Fe, and in cities such as the capital itself, Entre Ríos and Mendoza, allows the occupant of the Casa Rosada to face the second half of his term with more favourable prospects.

It is not often that Argentine presidents manage to finish their terms and hand over the presidential sash in a normal democratic manner to a successor elected at the polls. In this regard, most polls predicted that Milei would not reach the end of his term either. Now that the final results of these elections are known, his horizon appears clearer, but he will have to work hard to dispel uncertainties and threats and, above all, to confirm the hopes placed in him by the majority of an Argentine people disillusioned by so many empty promises, so much misleading rhetoric, so much corruption and so much less money to make ends meet.