The eccentric far-right populist Javier Milei has failed to win the first round of Argentina’s presidential election, with the centrist finance minister Sergio Massa unexpectedly beating his radical challenger.
The eccentric far-right populist Javier Milei has failed to win the first round of Argentina’s presidential election, with the centrist finance minister Sergio Massa unexpectedly beating his radical challenger.
That’s exactly the why. Whenever a peronist presidency fails (which is… all of them for the most part), people will vote for the “whatever’s not peronism”. It’s akin to people in the US voting “not rep”. You can’t think of this as right/left, it’s “populists you know that never fix things, vs someone else that might be a nuclear bomb on the economy and everything else but current status quo is already a guaranteed death sentence albeit slower so might as well try something new”. That’s the pendulum swinging hard in the opposite direction, people don’t vote for the status quo when in desperation and crisis. This time it’s just more extreme than usual. It doesn’t help that there’s not a single actually good option that you’d say “yeah, I can live with this” available.