Milei triumphs in Argentine midterm elections closely watched by Washington
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9:59 PM on Saturday, October 25
By ISABEL DEBRE
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei won decisive victories in key districts in midterm elections Sunday, clinching a crucial vote of confidence that strengthens his ability to carry out his radical free-market experiment with billions of dollars in backing from the Trump administration.
In the election widely seen as a referendum on Milei's past two years in office, his upstart La Libertad Avanza party scored over 40% of votes compared with 31% for the left-leaning populist opposition movement, known as Peronism, exceeding analyts' projections.
Milei, a key ideological ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, said he picked up 14 seats in the Senate and 64 in the lower house of Congress on Sunday, bolstering its count in the legislature enough to uphold presidential vetoes and block impeachment efforts. It wasn't immediately clear if those seats belonged to his party or allied blocs.
Trump earlier this month appeared to condition a $20 billion currency swap deal with Argentina's central bank and an additional $20 billion loan from private banks on a good showing for Milei in national midterms, threatening to rescind the assistance for the cash-strapped country in the event of a Peronist victory.
Those contentious comments added to mounting pressure on Milei, who has scrambled to avert a currency crisis as investors hedging against turbulence after Sunday's elections dumped the Argentine peso in droves in recent weeks.
But in the end, the Peronist alliance did very poorly, underscoring how weak the once-dominant movement has become in the Milei era, largely as a result of internal divisions. The coalition has struggled to channel rising public anger with painful austerity measures into a new political strategy after delivering the economic shambles that Milei inherited in late 2023.
At his party headquarters late Sunday, a beaming Milei hailed the election sweep as a mandate to press forward with his spending cuts and introduce ambitious tax and labor reforms. The results also automatically position him as a candidate for reelection in 2027.
“The Argentine people have decided to leave behind 100 years of decadence," Milei exulted as his supporters cheered. “Today we have passed the turning point. Today we begin the construction of a great Argentina.”
Perhaps never has an Argentine legislative election generated so much interest in Washington and Wall Street. But the buzz around the election abroad wasn’t felt in Argentina.
Although voting is compulsory, electoral authorities reported a turnout rate of just under 68% Sunday, among the lowest recorded since the nation’s 1983 return to democracy.
Trump raised the stakes of Sunday's vote when he warned, “If he wins we’re staying with him, and if he doesn’t win, we’re gone,” after meeting his ally at the White House earlier this month.
Milei got a taste of the nightmare scenario of losing the vote last month, when the Peronist opposition won a landslide victory in Buenos Aires provincial polls.
Argentina’s bonds and currency nosedived as markets sensed that the public was losing patience with Milei's reforms and that the midterm race would be tight. Opposition politicians overturned two of Milei's presidential vetoes to pass spending measures that jeopardized his hard-won fiscal balance and further rattled markets.
Milei burned through billions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves to shore up the peso. In an extraordinary move, the U.S. Treasury then came to the rescue, selling dollars to help meet soaring demand for greenbacks and finalizing the credit line.
The results showed Milei’s young libertarian party gaining support across the country — including in some surprising corners that have long been under the sway of Peronism.
In the closely watched Buenos Aires province, a Peronist stronghold home to nearly 40% of the electorate, La Libertad Avanza eked out a razor-thin victory Sunday. Just last month, the Peronists beat Milei’s party there by a whopping 14 percentage points.
Axel Kicillof, governor of Buenos Aires province and the most influential elected official in the Peronist opposition, criticized Trump for putting his thumb on the scale. He warned that the billions of dollars in financial aid from the U.S. Treasury and investment banks would do nothing to help ordinary Argentines squeezed by Milei's cuts to subsidies or forced out of business by a contracting economy.
“I want to make it clear that neither the U.S. government nor JP Morgan are charitable societies,” he said. "If they come to Argentina, it is for nothing other than to take a profit, to jeopardize our resources.”
With Milei's efforts to deregulate the economy and scrap tariffs winning him support from Argentina’s powerful agriculture sector, his party swept Santa Fe Province, which dominates soybean production and processing.
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Associated Press writers Almudena Calatrava and Débora Rey contributed to this report.
