The midterms are over – can Milei reinvent himself?

The country votes tomorrow. When Argentines wake up on Monday, inflation will still be around two percent a month, there will be market pressure on an overvalued peso, the Central Bank will be empty of international reserves, unemployment will be slowly but surely edging up, manufacturing SMEs will be running at around 50 percent of their installed capacity, people with disabilities will struggle to get their assistance, pensioners will get pensions below the poverty line, and Vaca Muerta will continue to pump oil.

President Javier Milei will be, in material political terms, in a better position than he was before the election. The 24 Senate seats up for grabs tomorrow (a third of the total) were elected in 2019, when La Libertad Avanza did not exist. The 127 seats to be voted for in the lower house Chamber of Deputies (half of the total) date back to 2021, when La Libertad Avanza only won two seats – Milei’s and Vice-President Victoria Villarruel’s. Each seat they win tomorrow will be an extra seat for Milei.

This will be the base narrative of the government on election night, especially if the result is not as good as they would have liked. Milei has reached a difficult position because he gambled on symbols rather than reality, both in economic and political terms.

In the economy, Milei has been pretending that the Argentine peso was worth more than it is. An artificially strong peso got Argentines to spend a lot of dollars over the last year and this forced the Milei economic programme to borrow extra greenbacks in order to crawl its way to the election in one piece. The bill has to be paid eventually.

The most recent lifeline came from the US Treasury. Under increasing domestic pressure to explain why he is giving so much to Milei when he is shutting down the government at home, US President Donald Trump said Argentina is “dying.” When he is not in the White House, Trump lives in Florida and could probably even see with his own eyes how Argentine tourists ransack shopping malls in Miami like there’s no tomorrow.

Politically, Milei has fed symbolism too much. For months, he had been forecasting that La Libertad Avanza would “paint the country purple” – a reference to his party colours – in the coming election. He painted himself into a corner. Being the only national party running on the same brand nationwide would be an asset if that landslide scenario had been true, but it will be a liability if the party performs poorly.

An overconfident (just as the peso was overvalued) Milei presented this midterm vote as a referendum on the course of the administration, something he did not need to do. To win a referendum you need more than 50 percent of the votes, as in a second round of presidential voting. If that were the case, Milei would be comparing his party’s performance tomorrow with the November 2023 second round, when he got more than 55 percent of the votes.

Had he not promised a sweep, Milei would be happy to get more votes in the popular vote than the 30 percent he got in the first round in October 2023. Progress, not perfection: winning votes after two harsh years of economic adjustment and political confrontation would be a major victory and show an upward trajectory for his political project into 2027, crunch re-election time.

This is particularly relevant given that, no matter what the result is tomorrow, the Peronists will remain divided. Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof will continue to be the obvious contender for the presidency in two years’ time, but nothing is obvious in Argentina and his leadership will be challenged, from outside and within.

For more than a year, Milei invested too much energy and resources in an election that was not structurally designed to change much of his future. He only seems to have come to understand that in recent weeks, when it became clear that La Libertad Avanza will not turn into a hegemonic force overnight. This reckoning has been a good way to kick off a new phase for the government, starting Monday. 

The result might determine the scope and depth of the changes Milei needs to make – or is forced to make – but it will not eliminate the need for change itself. Can Milei reinvent himself?