Far-right candidate Javier Milei largely won the second round of the presidential election in Argentina on Sunday, November 19, at the end of a tense and indecisive campaign unlike any in forty years of democracy. His rival, the centrist Sergio Massa, admitted his defeat.
Javier Milei gathered 55.95% of the votes against 44.04% for Sergio Massa, according to initial partial results communicated by the general secretariat of the presidency after the counting of more than 86% of the ballots.
Javier Milei, 53, “is the president that the majority of Argentines elected for the next four years,” said Mr. Massa, the current economy minister, who came first in the first round on October 22 . Shortly before the partial official results were announced, he told supporters gathered at his campaign headquarters in Buenos Aires that he had called Javier Milei to “congratulate him and wish him good luck.”
Chronic inflation
The undecided, around 10% according to estimates, held the key to deciding between Massa, who had gathered 37% of the votes in the first round, and Milei (30%).
Chronic inflation, now at three figures (143% over one year), four out of ten Argentines below the poverty line, worrying debt and a currency that is unraveling set the scene for the second round in Latin America’s third largest economy.
Polls closed at 6 p.m., with a 76 percent turnout. Some 36 million Argentines were asked to decide between two completely opposed future projects.
On one side, Sergio Massa, 51, minister of the economy for sixteen months of a Peronist executive (center left) from which he has gradually distanced himself. This experienced politician had promised a “government of national unity” and a gradual economic recovery, preserving the welfare state, crucial in Argentine culture.
A climate polemicist
Facing him, Javier Milei, 53, a far-right economist, describes himself as an “anarcho-capitalist”. This television polemicist emerged in politics only two years ago. Determined to rid power of a supposed “parasitic caste”, he is determined to “cut apart” the “enemy state” and dollarize the economy. The new Argentine president is also an outspoken climate skeptic, for whom climate change is a “cycle”, not the responsibility of man.
The presidential election was taking place while Argentines are exhausted by prices that climb from month to month, even from week to week, when wages fall. The minimum wage is 146,000 pesos ($400). Rents are out of reach for many, and many mothers resort to bartering, as after the traumatic Gran Crisis of 2001. According to a study by the University of Buenos Aires published at the beginning of the year, 68% of young people aged 18 to 29 would emigrate if they could.
The country is under pressure from the fiscal rebalancing targets of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to which Argentina is painfully repaying a colossal $44 billion loan granted in 2018.
Insinuations of fraud
Javier Milei attracted a “bronca” (anger) vote, but his rhetoric, his desire to dry up public spending in a country where 51% of Argentines receive social assistance or his plan to “deregulate the firearms market” were also frightened. Also the “anti-system” candidate had lowered his voice between the two rounds. Fewer appearances, less clear-cut, and a message: “Vote without fear, because fear paralyzes and benefits the status quo. »
Adding to the ambient nervousness, the Milei camp has distilled insinuations of fraud in recent weeks, without a complaint being filed. “Beware of the very bad examples of [Donald] Trump and [Jair] Bolsonaro” who promoted such messages, or “did not accept the results,” Sergio Massa warned.
Mr. Milei, greeted at his polling station on Sunday with cries of “Freedom, freedom! », had assured that his camp was “good, very calm, despite the campaign of fear” against him. Mr. Massa, for his part, called on Argentines to vote “with reflection, serenity, calm,” and with “hope.” They made another choice.
