Milei nails it

Blogging will be on a light schedule this week because I’m busy with another project, but we should note the final result of one of the year’s biggest elections. Polls closed in Argentina at 8am this morning (eastern Australian time), but with just a single nationwide ballot to count the result was clear within a couple of hours.

With 99.3% of returns in, the official results show Javier Milei, of “Liberty Advances”, the clear winner on 55.7%, almost three million votes ahead of left-Peronist Sergio Massa on 44.3%. Massa promptly conceded defeat and congratulated his opponent. Turnout was 76.3%, down just slightly from the first round and down a bit more from the 80.8% recorded in 2015, the last time it went to a runoff.

So of the possibilities that I offered in Friday’s preview, the one that turned out to be right was that the pollsters had over-corrected for their first round failure. Then Milei fell short of expectations, but this time the predicted close result wasn’t really close at all.

The inevitable comparisons are being made with Donald Trump and with Jair Bolsonaro of neighboring Brazil – both of whom congratulated Milei. But Milei’s “libertarian” branding is quite different from theirs; neither of them made any secret of being straight-out authoritarians, but Milei seems to be quite genuinely attempting a synthesis of libertarian and authoritarian politics. The founders of libertarianism would have been incredulous at the concept, yet here we are.

Argentine voters, however, were probably not much concerned with such philosophical subtleties. For them, what matters is that their economy is a disaster area and radical measures of some sort are clearly needed to get things under control. That’s what Milei promises, and for their sake we should hope he succeeds.