Opposition divided
Can Peronists, Argentina’s former masters, stop Javier Milei?
They are in disarray. Hoping that his government fails is their main strategy
Photograph: AlamyIt has been a bumpy month for President Javier Milei of Argentina.
Despite his success in cutting spending, pulling down inflation and even reducing poverty, his government is irritable.
Troubles with the peso are fraying nerves.
Having partially floated it in April, the government has kept trying to prop up its value so as to press down on inflation.
But that has hampered foreign-reserve accumulation.
The government badly missed the reserve targets it agreed to in an imf bail-out in April.
That worries investors.
The strong peso has also induced spending on imports, creating a current-account deficit.
And trying to prop up the peso helped send short-term interest rates soaring dangerously.
Despite the government’s efforts, as the supply of dollars dried up at the end of the harvest the peso slid sharply anyway.
In July it fell by over 12%.
Concord among normally irreconcilable opposition parties is another headache.
On July 10th they passed increases in pensions and disability benefits.
Mr Milei vetoed the bill, but the opposition is trying to gather the votes to overrule him.
Even if it fails, it has already rattled the government.
Mr Milei branded his vice-president, who runs the Senate and oversaw the offending vote on benefits, a “traitor”.
With congressional mid-terms approaching in October, all this is far from ideal.
But if the drama is to hurt Mr Milei in those elections, or beyond, the opposition will need a modicum of credibility.
Instead, it has looked punch-drunk since Mr Milei won the presidency in 2023 as an angry libertarian outsider.
Its recent show of organisation is the exception, not the rule.
Moderate alternatives seem doomed.
The centre-right Republican Proposal (PRO) party, run by a former president, Mauricio Macri, was obliterated by Mr Milei’s Liberty Advances party in elections in May in the city of Buenos Aires, normally a PRO stronghold.
Unable to beat Mr Milei, the PRO has joined him. It hopes an alliance with Liberty Advances in elections for Buenos Aires province in September and in the congressional mid-terms will let it survive.
It may well simply become irrelevant.
The contest between Mr Milei and Peronism, the amorphous populist movement that dominated Argentine politics for 80 years, is deeply polarised.
Third parties like the PRO may be squeezed out.
But the Peronists are in disarray, too.
Just 29% of Argentines say they will vote for them in the mid-terms, and nearly 40% plan to vote for Liberty Advances.
In June the Supreme Court upheld a six-year sentence for corruption for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a former president who leads the movement.
She is under house arrest and barred from public office.
The decision prompted a show of outraged unity among Peronists, yet in reality they are still deeply divided.
Ms Fernández may aspire to copy Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, who was jailed for corruption, but got his conviction annulled and won power again.
But this is unlikely.
If she did leave national politics, it might ultimately help the Peronists: though she has a devoted core of supporters, she also carries some weighty baggage.
Other leading Peronists include Máximo Kirchner, Ms Fernández’s son; Axel Kicillof, the governor of Buenos Aires province; and Sergio Massa, economy minister in the previous government.
None excites voters.
All come from Buenos Aires, so they may struggle to win support in the rural interior, which contains Mr Milei’s firmest supporters, especially young men.
Mr Massa has already lost to Mr Milei once, in the presidential run-off in 2023.
Three-quarters of Argentines dislike Mr Kirchner, according to a recent opinion poll.
Mr Kicillof’s job gives him a high profile but he is dogged by his involvement in the sloppy nationalisation in 2012 of YPF, the country’s largest energy company, when he was Ms Fernández’s economy minister.
All three have endorsed a joint Peronist platform and candidate lists for the upcoming elections for the province of Buenos Aires, but the process of reaching agreement was slow and painful, and repeatedly nearly collapsed.
Messrs Kicillof and Kirchner do not get on. Juan Grabois, a hard-leftist in a leather jacket who ran in the Peronists’ presidential primary in 2023, stayed out of negotiations.
All bar Mr Grabois are now trying to agree on joint lists for the mid-terms.
Each faction hopes the coming elections will demonstrate their might and help crush internal rivals before the next presidential election in 2027.
The movement has barely started to discuss its difficulties.
“We are like a sick man who won’t go to the doctor,” says Fernando Navarro, who served in the last Peronist government.
Some Peronists think they moved too far to the left; others say they have lost touch with the poor.
Few mention their chaotic economic record.
Nor do they agree on style. Mr Grabois says they must be as aggressive as Mr Milei, who swears incessantly and insults and threatens rivals and journalists, calling them “eunuch donkeys” among other things.
By contrast, someone close to Mr Massa says the opposition should be “firm but not rude”.
There is little focus on ideas.
“We either repeat phrases from [Juan] Perón from 50 years ago…or we snipe at colleagues,” says Mr Navarro.
One good reason for the Peronists to worry is the sense that Argentine attitudes have profoundly changed.
In 2011 some 70% of Argentines “wanted to live in a country where most things are done by the state rather than the private sector”, according to Isonomía, a pollster.
By 2024 that number had fallen to 42%. Some Peronists are starting to echo the libertarian, anti-statist Mr Milei.
“It’s true that fiscal balance should be a golden rule,” says the person close to Mr Massa.
The leading Peronists will highlight unemployment and shrinking state pensions, but for now their main strategy is just to hope that Mr Milei stumbles dramatically before 2027.
A crisis triggered by a volatile exchange rate is not unimaginable.
Yet voters who tire of Mr Milei may simply stay at home—or look for another new face.
That could open the door to an ambitious provincial governor.
Those from different political parties have a history of working in concert to oppose the presidency.
Keep an eye on Martín Llaryora of Córdoba and Maximiliano Pullaro of Santa Fe, says Ana Iparraguirre of GBAO, a pollster.
The pair, along with several other governors, recently announced a new nationwide political alliance for the mid-term elections.
For his part, Mr Milei is furious at the opposition for trying to increase spending.
He says he will reimpose his spending cuts “after we crush them”.
But Mr Milei must work with the opposition after the mid-terms, whatever the outcome.
Just a third of the seats in the Senate and half of those in the lower house are up for grabs, and he has only a few lawmakers now.
That makes his scorched-earth approach risky.
For a chance to truly crush the opposition, he must wait for the general election in 2027.
His own job will be on the line then, too.
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