2023-11-20 01:26:43
Argentina enters a new era in its political history with the election of a far-rightist as president. The economist Javier Milei, candidate of La Libertad Avanza, has obtained 55.7% of the votes in the second electoral round compared to 44.3% of the Peronist lawyer Sergio Massa, of the Unión por la Patria coalition, with 99% scrutinized.
The result indicates that Milei (Buenos Aires, 1970) has garnered the vast majority of the votes of the 23.8% that had been voted for the right-wing Patricia Bullrich, of Together for Change, in the first round on October 22. With that information, another winner of the elections, just one step below Milei, is the former conservative president Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), who has provided support to the far-right at the cost of dismantling his own coalition.
The extremist has obtained great victories, greater than 40 percentage points, in relevant provinces due to their electoral weight such as Córdoba (center) and Mendoza (west). He has also clearly won in Santa Fe (northeast), the city of Buenos Aires (east) and Patagonia.
Massa (San Martín, 1972) needed a wide advantage in the province of Buenos Aires to counteract the result of the ultra in the central area of the country. He didn’t get it, it was almost a tie. The Peronist has surpassed Milei by just 1.5 percentage points in that province where 37% of Argentines reside.
The forcefulness of Milei’s victory, greater than that predicted in the polls that most favored him, has led Massa to recognize defeat after 8:00 p.m. (midnight in Spain), before the official data were released.
“Let them take charge”
At 10:00 p.m., Milei addressed his supporters gathered around the El Libertador Hotel, in the center of Buenos Aires. The euphoria of a public with a greater weight of young people and men was evident due to a triumph built in record time by an ultra-liberal, eccentric economist with an aggressive speech, who emerged from television screens, consulting and a high position in Corporación América, an emporium with interests in airports, hydrocarbons and construction. Before being elected to the Casa Rosada, Milei had only one electoral experience, in the midterm elections in 2021.
“Today is a historic night for Argentina,” said the winner. Milei has repeated a typical nostalgia of the Argentine right about the supposed development achieved by Argentina’s “richest economy in the world” between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, when a country with a vast territory, very sparsely populated, was just setting up its borders and adding to millions of immigrants, and when the world demanded the agricultural products of the fertile pampa.
Milei has been welcomed on stage by his sister Karina, a person with experience in speaking with spirits who is in charge of managing the finances of La Libertad Avanza, charging for consultancies and managing collaborators, and whom the president-elect calls “the boss.”
The economist has pointed out thanks to Macri and Bullrich for supporting him “selflessly” for the second round. “In an act of greatness, they gave their all to defend the change that Argentina needs,” he celebrated.
The transition towards the change of command, on December 10, sets off alarms in an economy subject to exchange tensions, without dollars in the Central Bank. The risk of a hyperinflationary explosion is around the corner, which, for Milei’s dollarization plans, would be useful, according to the economist himself while he was a candidate.
In that sense, the president-elect made no effort to mitigate the dangers. “Let them take charge of their responsibility until the end of the mandate, on December 10,” he said in a response to the claim that the defeated candidate and Minister of Economy, Massa, had made two hours earlier, for the elected to provide “ certainties and guarantees” in the transition.
The far-right has also sneakily warned that it will repress the protests. “We know that there are people who are going to resist. “Within the law everything, outside the law nothing.” In the past, Milei has said that he will not tolerate demonstrations that disrupt traffic. Street protests by social organizations and unions are common in Argentina.
“In this new Argentina, there is no place for the violent,” said Milei. Both the president-elect and Macri, Bullrich and the future vice president, Victoria Villarruel, have celebrated “trigger-happy” cases in the past that ended in the deaths of alleged criminals and even some protesters.
“The changes that Argentina needs are drastic; There is no room for gradualism, there is no room for half measures,” Milei said, once again, with lyrics inspired by Macri, who, in two books, outlined as the only self-criticism of his failed presidency that he had not gone all the way.
On the outskirts, the crowd has repeatedly chanted, “Cristina se va prey,” in reference to Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the ultimate target of the Argentine right.
Massa, in damage count
“I want to thank all those who in this discussion of two country proposals that were put into play: unions, social organizations, civil society organizations, and the moving micro-militancy in the subway (metro), in the neighborhood, house by house “said the candidate and Minister of Economy in turn, escorted on stage in an artistic center in the Chacarita neighborhood by his wife, Malena Galmarini, the candidate for vice president, Agustín Rossi, and the governor of the province of Buenos Aires , Axel Kicillof, among other leaders.
In the previous days, Milei, Bullrich and those close to them had fueled the idea that the ruling alliance could commit fraud, something unthinkable in the Argentine electoral system, which has no record of this type in the last century. Massa, circumspect, alluded to the topic: “Argentina has a solid democratic system, which is also transparent and always respects the results.”
The defeated candidate came out well in a Peronism subjected to years of an exhausting fight between the president and the vice president, who is approaching his political decline after having starred in public life for two decades. Both outgoing rulers have low approval ratings after a government that, through a pandemic, war and historic drought, failed to reverse, and in some cases worsened, the social, exchange and debt crisis bequeathed by Macri in 2019.
Cristina is approaching her political decline after having been a protagonist in public life for two decades
“There were two paths. We choose the defense of the security system in the hands of the State (instead of the free sale of weapons); promote and defend the path of defense of public education and public health (before privatization) as central values,” said Massa with a measured message that places him as head of the opposition.
“We choose to defend the national industry, Argentine labor, our small businesses and workers with rights because it is the best way to build upward social mobility and progress for our nation,” he concluded.
The defeated candidate addressed “the eleven million Argentines who accompanied us.” “There are thousands and thousands of Argentines like those here who have the conviction and courage to defend this inclusive country in which we believe… with equal opportunities and a fair Argentina,” he said.
Fernández, absent; Macri, reborn
President Fernández was one of the great absentees from the campaign along with who turned out to be the great opponent of his administration, Cristina. The head of state recognized “the popular verdict” and said he was willing, via Twitter, to “work in unity with all the sectors that make up the national movement that will always fight for a just, free and sovereign homeland.”
The right-wing Bullrich, meanwhile, expressed: “I congratulate you, from the bottom of my heart.” “She won the profound change that we have been working for for years,” she added.
The former conservative candidate, called to occupy a relevant position in the ultra executive, completed the turn of her political career. In the heat of the campaign for the first round, Milei had described her as a “murderous Montonera” and had accused her, falsely, of placing bombs in kindergartens, because Bulrich had been a left-wing Peronist in the 1970s. Her first two boyfriends remain missing. Five decades later, her life finds her supporting Milei and the vice president-elect, Victoria Villarruel, who are open deniers of state terrorism.
Macri’s commitment to Milei, which caused some moderates from his party, PRO, and the more centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR) to stand on the opposite sidewalk, carried the risk of putting an end to his political career and threatened his goal of recovering the presidency of Boca Juniors. With the given result, Macri’s influence is projected.
The former president warned that he does not aspire to office, although in negotiations that encountered resistance among business executives and traders financial institutions that surround Milei, claimed responsibilities for those close to him in infrastructure policy and in justice. Since La Libertad Avanza has no structure and Milei is new to politics, it is expected that the leaders of Together for Change who followed Macri will assume positions in the State starting in December.
A shock agenda
The accumulation of retrograde proposals from Milei and Villarruel is infinite and promises to shake Argentine politics.
At the level of human rights, Villarruel leads the voice of denialism and even the vindication of the military dictatorship that caused 30,000 disappearances between 1976 and 1983. The vice president-elect daily accuses children, parents and brothers of disappeared people of being relatives of “terrorists”. This lawyer has spent almost three decades coordinating with detainee repressors and her lawyers, with whom she wrote books and spread her version of the story.
Villarruel anticipated that he will try to convert the site of historical memory located in the former Higher Mechanical School of the Navy, north of the Argentine capital, from which 5,000 Argentines disappeared during the dictatorship, into a public park “for all Argentines to enjoy.” .
Police officers who commit acts of institutional violence will have defenders in the new rulers, in light of past statements.
Yesterday was a day when old green Ford Falcon cars, emblem of the dictatorship’s kidnappings, returned to circulation. He saw them in the city of Buenos Aires and in Jujuy, according to images that went viral on social networks.
Milei stated that he will try to reverse the law on voluntary interruption of pregnancy passed in 2020, that he will deactivate comprehensive sexual education because he considers it indoctrination, that he will subject foreign policy to the axis of the United States and Israel, that he will not have institutional relations with Brazil and China (Argentina’s two main trading partners) because their presidents are “communists”, that they will privatize the strategic Yacimientos Petrolificadores Fiscales (YPF) and that they will apply a much greater spending cut than that demanded by the International Monetary Fund.
As for measures that the economist—emerged in a dazzling race from television screens through insults and explicit violence—calls second and third generation, there are the sale of organs, children, streets, animals, rivers and seas.
It was questioned whether the future president would carry out the total privatization of education and health, because, although he promised it many times, in recent weeks he went back on his word.
For all these measures, he will need parliamentary majorities that he does not have, not even the support of the deputies and senators who respond to Macri.
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