Argentina: why did Milei win the midterm elections?

The results of the legislative elections on Sunday, 26 October show how far Argentinian capitalism is from resolving its deep social, economic, and political crisis, which drags down the lives of millions of workers. Far from signifying a recovery of the regime, the victory of President Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), is a mere mirage.

Behind his electoral victory, which at first glance seems unexpected, lies an intensification of the contradictions that run through the entire system and that inevitably pave the way for new struggles and outbreaks in the arena of class struggle.

In a pre-election article we noted that: “It is clear that the political and financial crisis affecting the entire political regime will not be resolved by elections; on the contrary, it will tend to worsen, increasing political instability.”

For Marxists, it is not a question of laughing nor crying, but of understanding, of drawing the right conclusions that allow us to prepare for the tasks ahead of us.

The results

Half of the seats of the Chamber of Deputies and a third of those of the Senate were up for renewal in the 2025 elections. LLA obtained over 40 percent of the vote nationwide, while the Peronist electoral coalition, Fuerza Patria (Homeland Force), totaled around 34 percent.

This represents an important legislative advance for the ruling LLA party. The LLA will, together with the deputies of the right-wing PRO (Republican Proposal) and the Radicals, outnumber the Peronist deputies to be the largest grouping in the chamber. Without relying on allies, they will control a third of deputies, allowing them to shield presidential vetoes from being overturned in congress. In the Senate, LLA with the PRO will hold a third of the seats.

The result was unforeseen even by the government itself, which was predicting a defeat by a few points. This represents a step forward for Milei, who came into the presidency mostly unable to cobble together a legislative majority, and forced to govern by presidential decree and veto. Now the capitalists are greedily eyeing the possibility of making their coveted labour, pension, and tax reforms into law.

La Libertad Avanza was the only political force that managed to put forward a unified political brand and present its own candidates in the 24 electoral districts of the country. This reflected the strict top-down nature and homogeneity of the LLA party around the personality of Milei.

On the other hand, the Peronist coalition is far from homogenous, consisting of over 20 different parties, and so had to adapt to its regional variations, controlled by provincial strongmen. The PRO, the traditional party of the right, led by ex-president Mauricio Macri, practically ceased to exist, absorbed by La Libertad Avanza. In an international context of polarisation and discrediting of establishment parties, no force posing as a moderate version of Milei’s liberals can survive.

Crisis of the regime

Milei's victory lets the government buy time in the face of an economic programme that depends, like a drug addict, on injections of dollars from foreign financing. It was the intervention of Donald Trump and his Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent that prevented Milei's government from collapsing. At that time, a run on the peso, capital flight, the risk of imminent default, and allegations of corruption and drug financing threatened to unleash a terminal crisis.

It was the intervention of Donald Trump and his Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent that prevented Milei's government from collapsing / Image: public domain

That is why the capitalists were doubly euphoric when the results were announced. Milei could present a victory to Trump and therefore the dollars would flow into Argentina to keep the government afloat, and then on to fill the pockets of bankers and speculators gambling on the government's debt.

But this ‘resounding triumph’ of LLA hides a deepening of the crisis of the political regime as a whole. With a voter turnout of just 67 percent (down from 77 percent just two years ago), twelve million people did not vote in these elections. This is the largest rate of abstention recorded in a legislative election since the return of bourgeois democracy, and a figure larger than the support won by any one party.

This phenomenon did not come out of nowhere, it is part of a process which has been developing throughout previous elections. The low participation reveals an increasing rejection of bourgeois politics and the parties responsible for the crisis. It shows that broad sectors of the working class and youth no longer feel represented by anyone and are losing their illusions in the institutions of bourgeois democracy.

The growing rejection of the traditional institutions by the masses sets the stage for the sharp turns and shocks. While reformists and union bureaucrats blame the workers for their supposed backwardness and apathy, they try to cover their own pernicious role. But what this abstentionism really reveals is the desperation of a working class subjected to a constant attack on its living conditions for more than a decade, and the total absence of a left alternative capable of channeling its anger, rage, and frustration against the capitalist regime.

What has happened?

Bourgeois analysts have produced countless theories as to why the LLA performed better than it had in pre-election opinion polls, and in its loss to Peronism in the Buenos Aires provincial elections a month earlier. The government itself expected a defeat, and was engaging in a determined campaign in the media to lower expectations so as to present a loss as a win.

The ‘Trump effect’ played favourably for the government. On one hand, the financing provided by the US government eased the pressure on the peso and allowed inflation to continue to fall, this being one of Milei’s main political assets. On the other hand, Trump himself and the official media warned of the economic and financial chaos that would be unleashed if the government did not win the elections, saying, ‘If Milei loses, we will not be generous to Argentina’.

The fear of even deeper economic crisis in the face of a possible fall of LLA was combined with a consolidation of the anti-Peronist vote around Milei, especially after the victory of Peronism in Buenos Aires in September. This is part of the political polarisation that has undermined the political center, turning the elections into a dispute between La Libertad Avanza and Fuerza Patria.

In part, the LLA triumph was due more to the deficiencies of Peronism than to its own successes while in government. Fuerza Patria campaigned on ‘stopping Milei’, without offering any real political content beyond empty slogans. It couldn’t go beyond this, because its impotent programme of class collaboration offers no solution to the crisis.

The internal struggle in Peronism

Since 2015, Peronism has been losing ground in election after election. They had one respite in 2019, when its Frente de Todos (predecessor of Fuerza Patria) coalition channeled the rejection of Macri's government and its vicious attacks on the working class and attempt at pension counterreform, winning both the Chamber of Deputies and the Presidency. This year they registered less than two thirds of the votes they won in 2019.

While the list of registered voters grows, fewer and fewer vote, and Peronism's electoral base shrinks. Peronism no longer represents the aspirations of the working class, and can no longer contain their anger to safe channels as it did before.

The electoral blow of 26 October reveals and deepens the crisis of Peronism / Image: public domain

The decline of Peronism is the direct consequence of its attempt to reconcile two classes with irreconcilable interests: the bourgeoisie and the working class. In the name of ‘national unity’ they subordinated the interests of workers to those of big capital. They carried out a policy of servility to the bankers, the IMF, and the capitalists while in government and in opposition, especially after the assumption of Macri as President in 2015.

The electoral blow of 26 October reveals and deepens the crisis of Peronism. The poor results have brought its civil war out into the open. Ex-president Cristina Kirchner took aim at her ex-pupil Axel Kicillof, governor of Buenos Aires, for the strategy of holding the elections in Buenos Aires (which the Peronists won) on a different date from the national elections. She sharply called it a "political mistake" and laid responsibility on him for the defeat.

The Peronists have exhausted their political potential in this deepening crisis of world capitalism, and the masses are not fooled by attempts to rebrand and recycle themselves. Only the absence of a left alternative with mass authority allows Peronism to survive, although with less and less strength and credibility.

What is to be done?

The government, with its strengthened position in congress, is preparing a new offensive against the working class. Through labour, pension, and tax reforms it seeks to institutionalise super-exploitation. Eliminating severance pay, extending working hours, and facilitating layoffs, while increasing the retirement age and reducing benefits. Added to these measures are cuts in health, education, and scientific research.

The situation of working families is already desperate: incomes fall while layoffs and indebtedness increase. Inflation statistics, manipulated by the official bodies who record them, already show a rate of around two percent per month, and the pressure raising the value of the peso continues to push it higher.

Loans from Trump and Bessent, instead of a help, are really a new shackle. Every dollar that comes in ties the country more closely to US imperialism. Milei subordinates the country to an imperialist power which is in crisis and relative decline, with a protectionist trade policy, and which competes directly with Argentine agro exports to China. The Argentinian ruling class has given up the ability to negotiate between the different imperialist gangs in search of a better deal as the bourgeoisie of Brazil, Colombia or Ecuador do.

The Argentinian ruling class has given up the ability to negotiate between the different imperialist gangs / Image: Javier Milei, Twitter

Through Milei’s LLA, and all other capitalist parties, the ruling class will try to deepen its offensive against the workers by implementing the counter-reforms that it has been craving for years and until now could not apply. They want to consolidate a more repressive regime at the service of big business and financial capital. But such an attack will not go unanswered: these measures will inevitably provoke a massive resistance movement.

For now, this movement is conditioned by the passivity and subordination of the union leadership. The CGT (General Confederation of Labour) and the CTA (Argentine Workers' Central Union) are tied to different sectors of Peronism, which has allowed the Milei government to move forward with its attacks without facing real opposition from the organised labour movement.

This loss of political independence paralyses the struggle of the working class and subjects it to the interests of a trade union bureaucracy that fears mobilisation from below more than the government itself. But the masses have shown in this last period that they are not willing to give up without a fight.

Despite the passivity of their leaders, the working masses fight as best they can with the means at their disposal: strikes, roadblocks, pickets, demonstrations, and all forms of struggle that express their accumulated discontent. Each of these actions, though for now isolated, reflect the enormous latent energy of the working class, and its will to fight its way out of the constant attacks by the government and capitalists.

The left must organise the most advanced sectors around a programme that defends wages, jobs, and pensions, and that explains the necessity of expropriating without compensation the big capitalists responsible for the looting of the country.

This must include measures such as an indexation clause that updates wages, pensions, and social benefits in line with inflation; a rent freeze and the expropriation of empty homes owned by large landlords; the renationalisation without compensation of electricity, gas, and water companies, put under the control of workers and users to guarantee fair rates and service for all; the nationalisation under workers' control of any company that shuts down or lays off workers; and the non-payment of foreign debt.

It is also essential to organise workers' and neighborhood self-defence committees in the face of state repression, to guarantee the right to protest and defend the gains that are under attack.

An important part of the youth decided not to vote, not out of disinterest, but because they feel that this system has nothing to offer them. It is a generation marked by precarity, unemployment, and frustration. But it also has the potential to radically change everything. They need a cause to fight for. That cause exists: it is the struggle for communism, for a society worth living in.

The heartfelt demands of the working class, women, and youth must be united around such a revolutionary programme, and connected to the perspective of a political general strike, and a workers’ state of our own.