John Fund of National Review Online assesses the significance of Argentina’s recent election.
President Javier Milei was the big winner of last week’s midterm elections in Argentina. He blew past the opposition Peronists, the party that has dominated Argentine politics since Juan and Eva Perón founded it 80 years ago. By winning 41 percent of the vote, versus the 32 percent won by left-wing parties combined, Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, guaranteed that Milei’s vetoes can’t be overridden. He now also has an excellent chance of convincing smaller parties to join him in passing legislation.
There was another big winner. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saw his department’s policy vindicated. The Treasury — which invested in peso-denominated instruments just before the election — will likely make a profit as the appreciation of the peso since Milei’s win increases the value of those assets. After the election, Bessent slammed Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren as an “American Peronist” for her urging U.S. banks to not fund Treasury’s financial support package for Argentina. In another X post, Bessent noted that Milei “won in a landslide with the poorest members of society voting for economic freedom — a notion anathema” to Senator Warren. He concluded: “The message from the ballot box is clear: Argentines support a president who aims to move toward a modern capitalist economy, with the goal of placing the country among those with the highest levels of economic freedom in the world.”
Argentina’s election could indeed represent a nail in the coffin of Peronism. The party’s decades of misrule and corruption have finally convinced many poor Argentines to abandon it. We’ve come a long way from the 1940s, when Eva Perón was considered saintlike by those whom she called “descamisados” (shirtless ones) and proclaimed herself their voice in government. Peronism was a disaster for the poor.
