It is commonplace to say that Brazil is not for amateurs. So what can we say? One of the most famous phrases about the country — or its tragedy — is attributed to Simon Kuznets, Nobel Prize winner for Economics in 1971: “There are four types of countries in the world: developed, underdeveloped, Japan and Argentina.”
The election of a libertarian in a country marked by state interventionism and fiscal instability should not be surprising. Recurrent crisis situations tend to produce radical political responses. The feat, however, is not just individual. The jumped from 14% to 41% of seats in the Chamber. Three factors were decisive: the lowest voter turnout rate in four decades (67%), despite mandatory voting; (R$107 billion) from Trump; and the US president’s promise to discontinue support if Milei were to lose. Peronism was largely defeated. Alternatively, it was even worse.
The trajectory of Argentina’s decline is inseparable from . Juan Domingo Perón was minister and vice-president during the military regime (1943–1945), elected president in 1946, re-elected in 1951 and deposed in 1955, he returned to power in 1973, passing away in 1974. The radicality of his movement was expressed in the rejection of representative democracy and aggressive social mobilization. It is no coincidence that Seymour Martin Lipset classified Peronism as “left-wing fascism” in “Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics” (1960).
Peronism has structured Argentine politics for a long time and its effects are still reflected in recent electoral results, as Andrés Malamud highlights. The geography of the vote for Milei reveals patterns consistent with this historical trajectory.
After the redemocratization of 1983, Peronists and radicals alternated in power, a period that began with Raúl Alfonsín, from the Radical Civic Union (UCR). In the last two decades, however, this logic has been replaced by the rise of new parties. As Malamud summarizes, “what changes is the internal ideology of Peronism and the external party of non-Peronism. It is the latter that maintains an identity that changes instrument [partidário] over time.”
While Peronism moved radically to the left under the Kirchners, the non-Peronist camp saw alternatives to the UCR emerge, in a process comparable to the decline of the PSDB in Brazil — first with Mauricio Macri’s PRO and, now, with Milei. This explains the recent victories in strongholds historically linked to the UCR, since the social bases of millenism are concentrated in the non-Peronist camp, with the partial exception of young voters.
Malamud’s image is accurate: “Peronism continues to exist because it failed; radicalism ceases to exist because it succeeded.” While the radicals played a decisive role in redemocratization and institutional consolidation, the Peronists maintain an essentially identity vote, resistant despite repeated failures.
Milei turned the game around and bought time: he has a quorum for a presidential veto, a broad base and — his Achilles heel — resources to negotiate with governors.
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