Ultraconservative political outsider Javier Milei appears to be in the lead after a stunning primary upset, with center-left economic minister Sergio Massa trailing closely behind.
ELLA FELDMAN | Courthouse News Service
BUENOS AIRES (CN) — With annual inflation hitting 138% and the local peso continuing to lose value at a dizzying rate, Argentines are looking for a way out as they prepare to elect a new president this month. Five presidential hopefuls, including a far-right libertarian and the country’s center-left economy minister, offer fundamentally differing answers to the country’s economic crisis.
Javier Milei, an ultraconservative economist and political outsider, emerged as the election’s frontrunner in a stunning August primary upset, taking home the highest vote total at 30%. The eccentric admirer of Donald Trump and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has amassed a devoted — and very much online — following, running on a pledge to abolish Argentina’s central bank and adopt the U.S. dollar as its official currency.
Milei’s rivals include Sergio Massa, who currently serves as the minister of economy in the center-left government led by President Alberto Fernández; and Patricia Bullrich, a center-right political veteran with a tough-on-crime reputation.
Rounding out the ballot are two candidates with essentially nonexistent chances: socialist politician Myriam Bregman and Juan Schiaretti, who currently serves as governor of Argentina’s Córdoba province.
These five candidates will face off for the presidency on Oct. 22, though by all indications, it’s a three-horse race between Bullrich, Massa and Milei. If no candidate clears the 45% vote threshold — or 40%, with a margin of victory of at least 10% — needed to win the presidency in one round, a Nov. 19 runoff between the top two candidates will decide Argentina’s fate.
Voting in the South American country is mandatory for all citizens from 18 to 69, and optional for 16- and 17-year-olds, as well as anyone over 70.
Public opinion polls severely underestimated Milei’s popularity ahead of the primary. Now, they largely have him in first place, with Massa trailing closely behind. The controversial frontrunner is particularly popular among male voters and young voters, polling suggests.
One of those voters is David Urbani, a 20-year-old studying economics at the National University of Mar del Plata. In 2018, Urbani stumbled upon Milei in a YouTube video and was enthralled by his libertarian ideology and radical economic proposals.
“There are a whole bunch of kids like me, who maybe weren’t interested in politics,” Urbani said, speaking from his home in Mar del Plata, a resort city on Argentina’s Atlantic coast. “But they heard this guy and thought, ‘what he’s saying makes sense.’”
Dollarization is the central promise of a Milei presidency. The candidate maintains that, through abolishing the central bank and replacing pesos with U.S. dollars, he can create an inflation-free Argentina. In a country that has suffered from double-digit inflation for over a decade, it’s a promise that holds great allure. However, many economists say the country lacks the dollars necessary to implement dollarization, and even if such a move was possible, it could bring more harm than good to Argentina’s working class.
Voters may be willing to take their chances, says Mark P. Jones, who researches Argentine politics and policy at Rice University. “They may say, ‘I’ll take that one percent chance of things actually changing, dramatically changing, in a paradigm shift under Milei, versus an effective guarantee of the status quo continuing,’” he said. “The belief there is that the status quo simply isn’t working.”
Massa, who became the country’s economic minister in August 2022, will need to overcome that widely held belief if he hopes to beat Milei. Many voters see Massa as synonymous with Argentina’s latest financial woes. In a recent presidential debate, the candidate addressed those critics directly, simultaneously apologizing for and distancing himself from the current administration.
“I understand that inflation is a huge problem in Argentina,” Massa said. “I also understand that this government’s mistakes have hurt people. For those mistakes, even though I wasn’t a part of them until I became the economic minister, I apologize.”
Massa is staunchly opposed to dollarization, a tactic that has been tried in countries such as Ecuador and El Salvador with mixed results. “Dollarization means going from earning what you earn today to earning a quarter of it,” the candidate told reporters in August. “It’s simple.”
Instead, Massa proposes lowering taxes, sending tax evaders to jail, introducing a digital peso, and renegotiating with the International Monetary Fund. Argentina — by far the biggest borrower from the United Nations’ financial agency — is currently struggling to pay back a whopping $44 billion loan.
“It’s really difficult to believe anyone these days,” said Fiorella Fassino, standing on a busy intersection near the presidential Casa Rosada. The 28-year-old, who works at the publicly-owned Banco Provincia, said she’ll most likely cast her vote for Massa.
“You never know if these candidates will actually do what they say they will, but I think Massa’s policies are the ones that can actually improve the country, little by little,” she said. “Nobody will solve things from one day to the next.”
Fassino said she fears a Bullrich administration, given how things went during center-right businessman Mauricio Macri’s presidency. The Macri administration, which led Argentina from 2015 to 2019, oversaw the only four-year stretch in the last 20 years with the left-leaning Peronist party out of power. Bullrich served as Macri’s security minister.
Under Macri’s leadership, Argentina received the largest loan in IMF history, approximately $57 billion. By the time the president left office, the country’s gross domestic product had shrunk by 3.4% and inflation totaled 240%. “When Bullrich’s government was in power four years ago, it was a disaster,” Fassino said. “Personally, it affected me a lot.”
Others, like business administration worker Viviana Bochicchio, appreciated the candidate’s work as security minister. She’ll be voting for Bullrich later this month, she said during her smoke break in downtown Buenos Aires.
“She doesn’t treat me like a vieja meada,” Bochicchio said, referring to a phrase frequently used by Milei supporters that literally translates to ‘old person who wet themself.’ “Nor like a right-wing oligarch,” she continued. “She’s the only one who treats me like a citizen.”
Bochicchio is especially interested in Bullrich’s commitment to ending public transportation strikes, which unionized workers have staged numerous times this year to demand improved salaries. “It’s a pain to have to commute every day to the office and not make it, or get there late,” Bochicchio said. “I understand their concerns, but I also need to work.”
Fassino is scared of a Milei presidency as well, she said. She works at a publicly-owned bank, the sort Milei vows to do away with if elected president. He also intends to privatize healthcare, education and other state-run entities.
“A lot of us have worked in the public sector, honestly, for years, and to lose our jobs would mean not being able to feed our families, like so many others,” Fassino said. About 40% of Argentines live in poverty, according to government data.
In addition to his contentious economic plans, Milei is campaigning on a number of incendiary social views. He wants to ban abortion, which Argentina legalized in 2018. He supports the right to bear arms and promotes the sale of human organs. He denies that climate change is caused by humans, dismissing the scientifically-backed fact as a socialist fabrication.
And in a presidential debate earlier this month, he dismissed the brutal dictatorship that shook Argentina between 1976 and 1983 as a two-sided war. “It’s not 30,000 disappeared,” he said, denying a widely accepted estimate from human rights organizations of how many Argentines were abducted and never found again under the military junta.
For some, such extreme comments make Milei impossible to support. Others, like Urbani, admire him more.
“The guy realizes that it probably doesn’t help him to touch on those topics,” Urbani said, referring to Milei’s controversial stances. “But he says what he thinks anyway, because he’s sincere.”
Since discovering Milei while still in high school, Urbani has built a social media presence around advancing the candidate’s libertarian ideology, reaching almost 7,000 followers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. He’s heavily campaigning for Milei from Mar del Plata. “Bit by bit, I’ve been able to convince a ton of people that Milei’s ideas make sense,” Urbani said.
The college student even submitted himself as a candidate for a minor government position called school advisor under Milei’s nascent Liberty Advances party, though he said he has no chance of winning.
The most likely result of the next round of voting, according to Rice University researcher Jones, is that Milei and Massa will go head-to-head in a November runoff. Many political forecasters agree.
“Voters are being presented with two not particularly palatable options,” Jones said. “One is to take a tremendous risk with Milei that’s more likely than not to make things much worse rather than better, but has a glimmer of hope. Versus Bullrich or Massa, which is to maintain the status quo where things are just going to get worse — albeit, at a more gradual pace than is likely to be the case under Milei.”
“It’s a pretty pessimistic scenario,” he added, “however you look at it.”
