There is good news and bad news for President Javier Milei. The good news is that the vote for his re-election is still 17 months away; the bad news is that, given the way things are currently going, he might not win.
In just over six months, Milei has moved from being one of the most popular leaders in the region to one of the least, according to monthly surveys published by CG Global Data firm. Last November, right after the midterm elections, Milei was the third-most popular leader after Bolivia’s Rodrigo Paz, who had just been elected at the time, and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Now Milei is the third-least popular leader, beaten only by Peru’s interim leader José Balcázar and Venezuela’s stand-in Delcy Rodríguez.
It would be concerning if Milei were not seeing these numbers; even more concerning if he were seeing them and ignoring them. According to the local press, the President told his ministers in a Cabinet meeting that he would rather “lose an election” than, for instance, fire his Cabinet Chief Manuel Adorni, who is becoming more and more embroiled in embezzlement allegations each day.
It would be very simple, however, if Adorni were the only – or even the main – source of the government’s problems. The decline in polling numbers coincides with a general feeling that the economy is stagnant and wages are not picking up, news that people are losing jobs and bleak prospects for the future.
Still, Argentines have not passed the point of no return at which they would vote for anything that opposes the current government. Milei still has leeway, especially because the opposition will take at least another year, until early or even mid-2027, to sort out its leadership disputes – if it ever does. Having Cristina Fernández de Kirchner jailed and banned is a headache rather than a solution: were she free to run, somebody like Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof could simply challenge her and try to beat her at the polls – behind bars, the former president is very much an unbeatable ghost.
If the current trajectory continues, Milei might rule himself out of the race. Is that what he wants? The entire political establishment and international investors are taking for granted that the President will run for re-election and that he can win. Until now, he has walked a shaky tightrope between pragmatism and boldness: he has been, for instance, pragmatic enough not to attempt a devastating dollarisation of the economy at the start of his term and is being counterintuitively bold in sticking to his fiscal “chainsaw” despite his popularity bleeding out.
The ultimate question may be: who is Milei governing for? Or more accurately, who does he think he is governing for? A few weeks ago we discussed how his government needed to find an agenda for the remainder of his first term – the answer seems to be more of the same medicine. It was good enough to bring him here but might not be sustainable to take him to the next signpost of his political career.
The recent announcement that there will be a new, bigger, better expanded version of the RIGI programme for major investment projects is a good example. RIGI gives investors in the most lucrative sectors of the economy, such as energy and mining, major tax breaks, which contrasts sharply with the public’s demands for public services – as the massive new university protest this week attested to that. Milei’s “Super RIGI,” as the government has called the proposed new scheme, follows that same pattern, granting even larger benefits to new sectors, mostly downstream business in the commodities value chain.
So far, investors in the basic RIGI scheme have committed to 36 projects totalling US$86 billion of investment, according to a database assembled by the firm Globaris. Milei’s government has approved 13 of those – most of them involve the mining and energy sector. The companies filing their projects are at this point more concerned about the political sustainability of the Milei government – and whether their RIGI benefits will survive after 2027 – than about getting more breaks for new projects.
A Milei geared up for re-election might want to slow both the benefits for business and the chainsaw imposed on the public – which continues to come in the form of utility rate hikes, shrinking wages and increasing job losses. Unless his mission, as he is said to have told his Cabinet, is about principle rather than reality.
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