By Lorena Soler*
On Sunday, August 13, 2023, the simultaneous and compulsory open primary elections (PASO) were held in Argentina. This electoral engineering was created by the then President Cristina Fernández in 2009 for the selection of candidates of the political parties, i.e., primary elections to decide who will dispute the positions at the national level. Such electoral strategy was imposed to provide some rationality to the Peronism dispute, democratizing the decision mechanisms, and to reduce the number of players by means of the electoral threshold of 1.5% of the valid votes. An attempt was made to export the Uruguayan model, for an Argentina where political disputes take place in the streets rather than at the ballot box.
The PASO results showed the configuration of a new electoral map, which on October 22 will reflect a new power map. For now, the result showed, even with a three-way tie, an undisputed winner, Javier Milei, and three big losers: Juntos por el Cambio, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and Peronism.
Javier Milei’s Libertad Avanza party won with 7,116,352 votes (30%), against Juntos por el Cambio with 6,698,029 votes – divided between Patricia Bullrich (16.98%) and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (11.30%)- and Unión por la Patria with 6,460,689 votes (27.27%), -divided between Sergio Massa (21.4%) and Juan Grabois (5.9%). Milei was the most voted candidate, to everyone’s surprise: analysts, intellectuals, consultants, and politicians near and far. Also taken aback were the neighborhood militant, the tireless twitterer and the neighbor around the corner. Javier Milei’s path is not new. For several years he has been part of the staff of daily guests of news channels and since 2021 he has been a national congressman for the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. Nor is his political-cultural phenomenon, which is rigorously studied in academic and journalistic circles, surprising. Several transcendent works have examined his libertarian ideology, have made ethnographies of his political acts, and have held symposiums on his books. But Sunday’s novelty is different. Javier Milei is no longer just a radical right-wing political experiment; he is a national electoral force. In that passage, he demolished the first myth: he showed us that he is no longer a Buenos Aires phenomenon, nor an exclusively urban one. Javier Milei came third in both Buenos Aires (capital and province) but also won in 16 provinces of the country with a transversal vote, in terms of social classes, generations, old political identities and tarnished ideologies. He was for a while the candidate that the establishment, to put it in a quick way, put in the center of the scene. In that way, he managed to make the whole electoral scenario be configured in the geography of the right and to show a Juntos x el Cambio as the democrat version. Now, the same establishment desperately seeks to deactivate it. Businessmen, corporations, and fragile agreements with the IMF are beginning to creak in the face of a political character that may put their own subsistence at risk. For a challenge, Trump and Bolsonaro have already been enough.
We are facing a triple tie and the end only brings uncertainty. “Anything can happen” is the phrase that runs through the analysis of the current situation. But we are not facing a 2001 (dissolution of the state and monetary authority) nor a before 2015, where Daniel Scioli could show Mauricio Macri welfare indicators of a government that was leaving through the big door
Neither his own nor those of others considered the possibility that Javier Milei would be elected in first place to comfortably enter the presidential race, whose first round will be decided on October 22. There were several elements to assume that he would be in third place in the result of Sunday, August 13: his lack of party structure and the poor results obtained in the provincial elections, in which Milei was not a candidate, which were held “separately” from the PASO in the previous months. The governors, trained in the art of subsisting, held their own provincial elections disengaged from the PASO, which would probably have ordered the board in a different way. As a counterfactual example, it is worth highlighting that on Sunday, Libertad Avanza lost in three of the five jurisdictions where governors and other provincial authorities were elected: Milei was not the most voted candidate in the City of Buenos Aires, Province of Buenos Aires and Catamarca.
Milei is also the son of a phenomenon that is growing in today’s democracies: independent voters who not only decide their vote minutes before the darkroom, but also put together their own electoral collage: they can choose crossed options for each of the levels of representation (mayors, governors, presidents) with scissors and playdough. This practice, which surely in the province of Buenos Aires and the suburbs was encouraged by the mayors themselves, every time that the phenomenon of Libertad Avanza grew in their territories and threatened their survival, is combined with two other behaviors: absenteeism and blank vote. On Sunday 13, 1,438,897 less voters went to the polls than in 2019 and, of those who did go to the polls, 1,148,342 voted blank. Or if you prefer, out of 35 million people who were eligible to vote, 11 million abstained.
The second place was obtained by Juntos por el Cambio (Together for Change), the only party that really disputed its internal contest in the PASO. There, Patricia Bullrich won (4,022,466 votes, 16.98%) against Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (2,675,563 votes, 11.30%). Together, they obtained 28% of the PASO, undoubtedly a meager result for the party. Furthermore, the competition for the same electorate as Javier Milei, places the traditional first national party right wing in a complicated scenario for October.
In the PASO of 2019, the Juntos por el Cambio formula, Mauricio Macri – Miguel Pichetto, had obtained 7,825,998, i.e. 1,127,969 more than this last election. There, surely, the little weight that Larreta, the Head of Government of the City of Buenos Aires, obtained in the national territory, but also in his own commune, his own house, his own showcase, was decisive. Illusioned with the trajectory of his former boss Mauricio Macri, he imagined the passage from the government of the city to the government of the Nation without further obstacle and ended up in a resounding defeat. He proved to be a manager, but not a politician. The PRO is also a great recycling garbage can.
And, finally, Peronism suffered a historic defeat, piercing its electoral floor. Since 2015, Peronism has not been able to find the pulse of its own ills. A Kirchnerism that has not been purified or starved to death in any of its versions. A league of governors without compass or electoral weight. A Buenos Aires Peronism and a vice-president who marked the final cards of the current president Alberto Fernandez. So far, the Peronist hegemony in the Senate, founded in the year 83′ and never questioned, is over. But in addition, as a symptom of the times, Massa lost in Tigre, his hometown, and the Kirchners lost in Santa Cruz. The crisis of the two parent companies, according to Carlos Pagni.
Sergio Massa, the candidate of urgency, the only candidate with votes 24 hours before the closing of the list. The candidate of a Ministry of Economy with inflation and poverty indexes that destroy in seconds any political identity. Without an electoral campaign, without chiefs or bosses to escort them, Sergio Massa had a decent performance that he will have to thank Axel Kicillof for, the only Peronist candidate who in his dispute for the gubernatorial candidacy in the province of Buenos Aires retained the handful of voters that can put the ruling party in the ballotage.
All these elements make up a new electoral and political map that clearly describes an end of cycle. Profound changes in political representation, reflecting a broken, fragmented and individualized society, as well described by José Natanson. Milei is a bit the vote of Tik Tok, but also of those who cannot imagine losing rights because they no longer have them or never had them. To imagine losing your retirement, first you must be a formal worker. In addition, a historical defeat of Peronism as a party and movement that ordered power in Argentina and built powerful horizons of equality and integration under “social justice”. This historical slogan, which, without social incarnation, today Milei can turn into a slogan and call to destroy it. Peronism, which placed the State and with it the rights at the disposal of the majorities, today leaves them out in the open. In the face of nothingness, Milei’s magical and simplistic discourse is attractive, summoning and an escape point for so much discomfort.
The electoral chessboard forces to think of another electoral campaign. Rearming agreements, looking for allies in old traitors and redoing tight mathematical calculations with scarce votes. We are facing a triple tie and the end only brings uncertainty. “Anything can happen” is the phrase that runs through the analysis of the current situation. But we are not facing a 2001 (dissolution of the state and monetary authority) nor a before 2015, where Daniel Scioli could show Mauricio Macri welfare indicators of a government that was leaving through the big door. In fact, Cristina Fernandez knew how to make her farewell as president a political and collective event. This post-pandemic fate is not that of Alberto Fernández or his vice-president.
The clock is ticking too slowly for a people that will spend a semester immersed in an electoral process that is once again viewed with distance and distrust.
*Professor and researcher at CONICET, UBA and IEALC.
Cover image: www.elciudadanoweb.com