Posters of dozens of severe-looking faces, all belonging to Javier Milei, the frontrunner in Argentina’s presidential race, are plastered across a shuttered shop front in Caseros, a lower middle-class Buenos Aires suburb a mile from where the free-market economist grew up.
Inside the headquarters of a small libertarian campaign group, Gabriel Muñoz, a 45-year-old railway worker, said mismanagement by Argentina’s politicians had driven the country to economic ruin — pushing inflation to 113 per cent and the poverty rate over 40 per cent this year — and converted him into a diehard Milei fan.
“We railwaymen used to have a barbecue three times a week, now it’s once a fortnight. And I’m lucky — I see more and more people eating from the trash,” said Muñoz, who is running for a seat on the town council.
“It’s become common to call Argentina ‘a shitty country’. But it’s only our politicians that have made it shitty,” he added. “Milei knows how to fix it.”
Before his shock victory at August 13’s nationwide primary, which serves as a dry-run for October’s election, most pollsters had considered Milei — an eccentric former TV commentator and self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who wants to dramatically shrink the state and dollarise Argentina’s stricken economy — as a fringe player.
But Milei’s 30 per cent of the primary vote suggests a significant chunk of the population no longer trust Argentina’s establishment blocs — the ruling populist Peronist coalition, which scored 27 per cent, or the pro-business opposition Juntos por el Cambio (JxC) on 28 per cent — to solve the country’s chronic dysfunction.
“There is an entire generation who have never seen the country [do well] economically, and that frustration has led us here,” said Juan Negri, a politics professor at Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires. “There are plenty of Argentines who want to try something new.”
In October Milei’s main rivals will be JxC’s Patricia Bullrich, a rightwing former security minister, and centrist economy minister Sergio Massa.
Milei’s Libertad Avanza party won the most votes in 16 of Argentina’s 24 regions. Analysis of voting districts suggests Milei did well in both working class areas and well-heeled neighbourhoods. He scored slightly higher in areas with a younger demographic.
Mely Retiz, a 24-year-old student, said she became a Milei supporter after coming across his furious rants against the political elite on one of many social media fan accounts, some of which are named “Milei’s Wig” after his unruly hair and sideburns.
“In the past, nothing caught my attention in politics because it’s all the same,” she said. “[But] he is very direct, which is great.”
Alejandro Stemke, 20, who studies politics and works in his family’s sandwich shop, said he the key to creating jobs is Milei’s plan to reform strict labour laws and slash Argentina’s tax-to-GDP burden — the second highest in Latin America after Brazil, according to the OECD.
“There so many taxes here that companies can’t grow and hire people. So there’s a lot of unemployment. A lot of people my age are moving abroad.”
Late last month the IMF approved a $7.5bn disbursement from its current $44bn loan agreement, despite Buenos Aires’ failure to meet key targets, to prevent the country falling into arrears before October’s elections. Argentina is the fund’s largest debtor.
After the economy, voters rank crime and corruption as their main concerns, polls suggest.
Milei’s hardline rhetoric — he has promised “zero tolerance” for criminals and punishment for the “murderous” political class — strikes a chord with Julian Victor, a middle-aged Uber driver, who said his three teenage children have all been mugged recently for their mobile phones.
“The rest of the parties are all corrupt, and too soft on the gunmen and motorcycle thieves who are running all over the place,” Victor said. “Without a tough leader, we’re never going to move forward.”
October’s vote will be closely fought, though most polls say Libertad Avanza has widened the three percentage point gap to JxC and the Peronists since the primary. The presidential election normally sees a 5 per cent increase in participation from the primary, and attention will now shift to those voters and the 7 per cent that backed smaller parties that will almost certainly not make it to a November run-off.
Milei’s primary voters are unlikely to abandon him now, said Juan Cruz Diaz, managing director of Cefeidas, a political advisory group: “Even if some people were voting as a protest against the establishment, the fact that he won legitimises him. That makes the 30 per cent more of a floor than a ceiling.”
In Caseros, some voters who did not plump for Milei in the primary are intrigued by his radical policies.
Cristina, a middle-aged pharmacist, said she was still weighing what to do in October, after the candidate she voted for — moderate Buenos Aires mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta — lost out on JxC’s presidential nomination to Bullrich.
“Milei has a lot of good proposals,” she said, citing his education plan, which involves reallocating state resources that normally go to public schools to a voucher system, enabling parents to choose which school their child attends.
“But I don’t like what he said on organs,” she added, referring to several interviews in which Milei has voiced support for legalising the sale of human organs to reduce transplant waiting lists.
Ana Iparraguirre, a political consultant at Washington strategy firm GBAO, said Milei’s campaign and his performance at presidential debates in October would determine if he attracts enough new converts to reach a run-off.
“That said, it would be very difficult for him to not make it to a [run-off],” she added. “A massive shift would need to happen for him to be eliminated in October.”
If the run-off is against Bullrich, Cristina said she wasn’t sure what she’d do. “But if it’s against the Peronists, I’ll vote for Milei,” she said. “I wouldn’t think twice.”
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