‘I think they scared people’: In Argentina, populist’s bid falls short

If anyone was worried about the expected results of Argentina’s presidential race, it’s the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. In the days leading up to Sunday’s election, this group of older women was gathering, their heads wrapped in triangular white headscarves as they have been for decades.

Since April 1977, a year into Argentina’s last military dictatorship, they have marched around the square every single Thursday, demanding to know the fate of their children whom the military disappeared. Their suffering symbolizes the struggle to restore democracy in Argentina.

And now, 40 years on, they are worried that anti-democratic sentiment is rearing its head again in the shape of candidate Javier Milei, a loud, volatile, and relentlessly confrontational far-right libertarian economist who minimizes the crimes of the military, under whose seven-year rule 30,000 people are estimated to have disappeared.

On Sunday, despite polling predictions, the controversial candidate who campaigned on a pledge to largely dismantle the state came in second. But Mr. Milei astonished the country last August by winning primaries that generally foreshadow general election results. And now he will be on the ballot again in a runoff. Even if Argentine voters appeared to have second thoughts about Mr. Milei, he represents a style of politics that shows sign of taking root.

Mr. Milei, of the Liberty Advances coalition, took 30% of the vote, but he was outstripped by the economy minister, Sergio Massa, who won 37%. That, though, was shy of the needed threshold, so the two leading candidates will face each other next month.

Mr. Milei is likely to pick up some votes from supporters of conservative Together for Change candidate Patricia Bullrich, who was knocked out of the contest on Sunday, but her more moderate supporters may opt for Mr. Massa. Observers are unsure which way the vote on Nov. 19 will go.

“I think Milei’s and [running mate] Victoria Villarruel’s appeal to the most anti-democratic values worked against them at the last minute,” says María Esperanza Casullo, a professor of political science at the National University of Río Negro. “I think they scared people.”

Lara Goyburu, a political analyst who teaches at the University of Buenos Aires, echoes that. “It would have really surprised me if Milei had won in the first round,” she says. “His focus on disputing the democratic consensus of 1983 over the past few weeks cut really deeply for a large percentage of the population.”

Career politician vs. populist outsider

Mr. Massa, by contrast, is a smooth-talking career politician who gained prominence as mayor of the picturesque town of Tigre, to the north of Buenos Aires. He shot into the limelight when he was made economy minister last year. He has spent much of his time since then renegotiating the terms of a $44 billion International Monetary Fund bailout loan in the face of severe economic difficulties.

Mr. Milei, at the head of the Freedom Advances coalition, has made his name with a populist campaign against what he calls a corrupt political class, espousing fundamentalist free market policies, arguing that taxation is theft, and advocating the closure of the central bank, the adoption of the U.S. dollar, and the abolition of most government ministries.

He has also disputed the official number of people who died at the hands of the last military dictatorship and chose as his running mate a woman closely associated with that dictatorship.

“It has to be a strong call for the attention of Argentina’s political class that about 30% of the population thought they could vote for that sort of thing,” says Ms. Goyburu. “This doesn’t mean that they agree with it, but they’re so fed up with the lack of response to their problems that they’re willing to sacrifice common ground that seemed beyond discussion in Argentina.”

That is largely because Argentina’s economy is in dire straits, struggling in and out of recession for years. Over 40% of the population lives below the poverty line, including many workers whose purchasing power has been devastated by inflation, currently running at an annual rate of 138%, the worst in 30 years.

This has left many voters feeling that neither the center-left coalition led by President Alberto Fernández, who has ruled since 2019, nor the conservative Together for Change bloc, which had been in charge previously, has been able to turn things around.

“There is discontent with the limitations of democracy to solve peoples’ problems, and ... that was shown at the ballot box,” says Ms. Goyburu. “The political elite’s discourse recently has been far removed from most peoples’ reality.”

For Dr. Casullo, Mr. Milei’s violent election campaign, which has included insulting the pope, openly insulting women journalists, and calling for liberalized gun ownership laws, marks the arrival of a contemporary far-right discourse familiar in neighboring Brazil but hitherto unknown on the Argentine political scene.

This, she believes, seems likely to persist.  But despite voters’ frustration at the government’s failure to solve their economic and social problems, most are still unwilling to seek salvation in Mr. Milei’s extremism. “While Milei got 30% of the vote, 70% went to other parties,” Ms. Goyburu points out. “People are not going for these really argumentative discourses ... questioning democracy as a system.”