PRO versus La Libertad Avanza: Chronicle of a death foretold?

The Sixth Sense is a hugely popular film from 1996. Starring Bruce Willis, it follows a psychologist treating a young boy who claims he can see dead people. Spoiler alert: by the end, the protagonist realises he himself is among the departed.

With the obvious differences, the stretch between the 2023 elections and this weekend’s elections for the City Legislature in Buenos Aires City could be read as a replica of that plotline: PRO had been “dead” all this time, but we just never knew it. You can even pinpoint the party’s time of death – the night of the “Acassuso Pact” in October 2023, just before the presidential run-off, when former president Mauricio Macri sealed an alliance with La Libertad Avanza. From that moment, the outcome was written.

In fact, the former leader of Argentina’s centre-right could have done something as simple as googling what happened in other countries where new-right movements came to power – Donald Trump’s United States or Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. In both, the new political forces ended up devouring the entire spectrum from the centre to the right. 

The ending was predictable, but Macri and his circle failed to see it. “No way that’ll happen – they don’t have the numbers in Congress, they’ll have to negotiate with us,” one of the former President’s closest aides told me at the time. PRO overestimated its strength and fell into one of the most common political mistakes flagged by Ecuadorean spin doctor Jaime Durán Barba, once PRO’s top strategist: believing that votes belong to political leaders and can be shifted at will. 

PRO’s voters had already migrated to La Libertad Avanza before the Acassuso Pact. If the party had any slim chance of survival, it would have been by breaking away from that space and trying to build something new – the place they had occupied for nearly two decades no longer existed.

Just as the end of PRO was foretold, what comes next is equally predictable. In fact, signs of it were already visible before the vote, as long-standing party figures began jumping ship to the libertarian camp. That path can now only be more trodden. 

Once again, this is just the surface expression of something far more profound: the yellow brand has lost touch with the political mood of the moment. La Libertad Avanza is rising from those ashes.

Macri may now run in the national elections in October (something he had resisted so far, but is reported to be considering), but like Bruce Willis in the aforementioned film, he’s heading towards an ending that’s already been written.