Shocking: Milei wins PASO elections in Argentina

Shocking: Milei wins PASO elections in Argentina

Congressman Javier Milei of La Libertad Avanza (LLA) became the single most-voted candidate in Sunday’s Mandatory, Open, and Simultaneous Primary (PASO) presidential elections in Argentina with around 30.90 % of the votes, according to preliminary results released in Buenos Aires. Milei’s victory came as a surprise even to the most venturous of pollsters.

 Finishing second was Economy Minister Sergio Massa who easily breezed past Unión por la Patria (UP) challenger Juan Grabois. However, if both candidates are combined, the ruling party of President Alberto Fernández and Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) came in third with 26.69 % of the votes, behind opposition Juntos por el Cambio’s (JxC) 28.04%. In that alliance, former Security Minister Patricia Bullrich defeated Buenos Aires Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta leading up to the Oct. 19 elections.

Also on Sunday only two other candidates made the 1.5% cut and will therefore be competing in October: Córdoba’s Peronist (non-Kirchnerite) Governor Juan Schiaretti (4.31%) and Myriam Bregman of the Frente de Izquierda (2.57%).

JxC won nonetheless the gubernatorial races for the provinces of Mendoza, Entre Ríos, and Corrientes, and also for the mayorship of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, where Bullrich’s candidate Jorge Macri (cousin of former president Mauricio Macri) edged Larretism’s Martín Loustau.

Despite the nationwide catastrophe for Kirchnerism, UP still finished first in the provinces of Buenos Aires (the country’s largest district), La Rioja, Chaco, and Formosa.

Milei said in his victory message that he had won because his party was “the only space that made a concrete and complete presentation of a government program” and insisted on his diatribe against “the useless parasitic political caste of this country.”

He then thanked all his supporters “and my four-legged children: Conan, Murray, Milton, Robert, and Lucas,” his dogs. Milei then heralded the end of the discourse according to which “when there is a need a right” with no consideration to the fact “that someone has to pay for that right.”

“This model translates into a strong fiscal deficit, where Argentina has had a deficit for 112 of the last 122 years, since the beginning of the 20th Century it has had 22 crises, 20 of which are of fiscal origin, where sometimes it was obscenely high. This translates into indebtedness, defaults, and then, they resort to monetary issuance,” he added. “That model of … 170 taxes … only favors thieves and friends of power,” he continued.

“To think that until two weeks ago they were … saying that we were not even going to finish third!” he went on. La Libertad Avanza is “the real opposition”, because “we want the real change,” he also pointed out. “They also said we had no structure to face an election and today 17 out of 24 districts were painted in purple with La Libertad Avanza,” the presidential hopeful stressed.

“With these figures, we would be able to have 8 seats on the Senate and we would have more than 35 on the House of Deputies, we have built a force,” he argued.

The main threat for Milei in October stems from Buenos Aires Governor Axel Kicillof having received 32.4% of the votes in his reelection bid, followed by JxC’s Néstor Grindetti (Bullrich) and Diego Santilli (Larreta), the former outperforming the latter for a total of 29.2% between the two of them. LLA’s Carolina Píparo was third with 24% of the votes.