Election preview: Argentine runoff

Argentina goes to the polls on Sunday (Monday in Australia) for the second round of its presidential election. It looks like being a cliffhanger.

In the first round, held four weeks ago (see preview here and report on results here), left-Peronist Sergio Massa unexpectedly took a big lead with 36.7% of the vote. In second place was “libertarian” Javier Milei with 30.0%, followed by centre-right candidate Patricia Bullrich on 23.8%. Bullrich has endorsed Milei for the runoff, which you might expect would give him the edge, but things don’t always work that way in South America.

Prior to the first round, the opinion polls had mostly shown Milei in the lead or very close to it, but he underperformed noticeably. Now the polls show the second round to be neck-and-neck; if they are again overstating Milei’s support, then Massa should win. But it’s quite possible that they have over-corrected for their previous error and that Milei is really well ahead.

One reason that Massa’s strong first-round performance came as a surprise was that he has been economy minister for the last year under incumbent president Alberto Fernández (who decided not to seek re-election), and the Argentine economy is a basket case. With inflation running at something like 140%, it’s not surprising that voters might be attracted by Milei’s radical proposals, although some traditional centre-right voters might also see them as too much of a leap into the unknown.

I don’t have a problem with Milei’s economic policies; if he were to actually implement them I think they would probably do Argentina a lot of good. But the rest of his program is pretty scary: he is anti-feminist, anti-environment and an apologist for military dictatorship. The fact that he calls himself a libertarian, and his party “Liberty Advances”, could be seen as a bad joke were it not so typical of the way many self-styled “libertarians” have gone in recent years.

But the underlying choice is common in Latin America. Its voters often find themselves forced to choose between candidates of the left who will bring economic chaos (as I predicted when Fernández was first elected), and those of the right who know how to run an economy but are contemptuous of democracy and civil liberties.

The best solution, if it can be managed, is probably for the two to alternate in power. But the danger of far-right politics, including its modern Trumpist incarnation, is that it has no commitment to the peaceful transfer of power. And if that problem is uppermost in the minds of Argentina’s voters, then they just might decide to give the Peronists another chance.