When the voting ban began last Thursday, the most recent polls published and those still circulating on social networks and messaging applications showed a difference adjusted for the margin of error. In this context, this Sunday’s result at national level once again surprised everyone and everyone. With a difference of around 11% between the official candidate Sergio Massa and the opposition candidate Javier Milei, the latter was quickly and prematurely recognized by the entire political system as the new President of the Argentine Republic.
In these minutes following the result, three considerations arise.
First, according to the data, the Unión por la Patria (the current ruling party) will be the first minority in the Senate on December 10, with 33 seats, but it could reach its own quorum (37 votes) with the support of allied provincial groups. Meanwhile, Together for Change will have 21 seats, which will be a mystery since this force suffered a significant split after the explicit support of former candidate Patricia Bullrich and former President Mauricio Macri for the candidacy of Javier Milei. Meanwhile, La Libertad Avanza, the original force of the nation’s next president, will have just seven senators.
In this new political formation, in the Chamber of Deputies, the Unión por la Patria will retain the first minority with 108 seats, followed by Together for Change (94), and this again as long as the union between radicals and PRO is not broken. , and La Libertad Avanza will have a bloc of 38 deputies. This means that no bloc has its own quorum and the three (or four) main forces must negotiate among themselves.
In this sense, all structural reform measures such as the end of federal co-determination or criminal law reforms such as the end of voluntary abortion, which were promised in the election campaign by today’s victorious presidential candidate, are at least difficult to implement because they would require complex parliamentary agreements in these legislative formations.
Secondly, if the general elections meant a split for Together for Change, when the former presidential candidate Patricia Bullrich and then the former President Macri, without prior consultation with the coalition partners, pledged their full support to the candidate Javier Milei, who had publicly stated that due to his dislike for One of the coalition’s majority partners, the Unión Cívica Radical, its history, principles and references, these runoff elections leave the door open to a split in national Panperonism. Although between the PASO elections and this run-off, Sergio Massa managed to unite national pan-Peronism behind a discursive epic, leaving aside the internal relations between traditional provincial Peronism, the dominant Albertism and Christian Kirchnerism It is very possible that in the coming days there will be an… Internal settlement, which will mean a reconfiguration of the space. Sergio Massa begins this transformation with a certain advantage, as he resisted in an epic election campaign that managed to retain around 44% of the vote at national level, with interannual inflation of over 140%, but he failed to achieve the Winning the presidential election leaves the leadership position of national Peronism vacant and contested.
Finally, this runoff reflected the dissatisfaction and anger over the economic situation, expressed territorially in the PASO and tempered in the parliamentary elections. Javier Milei exceeded 45% in 22 of the 24 districts and 50% in 20 of the 24 districts. The threats made by the LLA candidates in the final weeks of the election campaign against the consensus of 40 years of democracy have not diminished the dissatisfaction of the majority of the population with the current economic situation and the recent past. The votes that candidate Patricia Bullrich received in the first round were almost mathematically transferred to the Libertarian candidate, and Sergio Massa’s campaign team, despite retaining his own votes, did not exceed the general election cap. The interior and the sectors hardest hit by the economic crisis, the nobodies not fully reached by state aid, turned overwhelmingly to the candidate who promised reforms reminiscent of the “surgery without anesthesia” of former President Carlos Menem remember in the nineties.
In a country with a parliamentary institutional structure that requires agreements, with divided majorities located territorially between the interior and the center, with a movementist character and a force that reflects during the election campaign on the repressive capacity of the state apparatus, which is in another economic crisis. As structural reforms with social costs are required, the medium-term scenario looks contradictory and unstable.
It remains to be seen whether the Argentine political system has the institutional antibodies shown in the 2001 crisis to survive a new possible government crisis.
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