Sunday May 18th 2025 and Javier Milei’s two year old Libertarian party “La Libertad Avanza (LLA)” faced its first real electoral challenge since Milei took power as president of Argentina just a year and a half before. Milei won his presidential election election with former president Mauricio Macri’s (2015-2019) explicit help. In that final eliminating round Milei had only received about a third of the votes but Macri’s own candidate had been eliminated. Only two remained for the run-off; Milei and Massa (neither from Macri’s PRO party) so ignoring Milei implied irrelevance for Mauricio. Macri called Milei to his house and offered to direct PRO voters Milei’s way against the weak Peronist candidate. Massa lost. Milei became president and Milei took on many of Macri’s former team |as ministers. The ruse worked then but 18 months is a long time in politics. Milei now seems to think he no longer needs the PRO. He might be right but he’s playing fast and loose with the law., which is his wont.
Whatever Mauricio Macri negotiated with Milei that hot December night seems to be off the table now. As the main Peronist candidate in Sunday’s vote (Leandro Santoro) said; Macri now faces what Argentina will face in the future; “the treachery of Milei.” Extraordinarily a city that has voted PRO for nearly two decades, and which is headed up by Macri’s cousin Jorge, has dumped the PRO for the hard right LLA. The right became so divided that the Peronist candidate Santoro almost won himself but he came in a little behind Milei’s LLA candidate Manuel Adorni.
Milei, like Trump has acted very autocratically since he took power. Rather than negotiate power with the legislative branch he runs roughshod over them. When he needs an approval vote he needs the PRO to win a vote in Congress and even moreso in the Senate where the LLA occupy no seats at all. That happens less and less as dictatorial politics have left Argentina’s presidents a facility called emergency decrees so they can push through new laws and remove others. Chronic corruption in the legislature means that votes can also be bought and often are. This makes the executive branch a super-presidency. Milei likes emergency decrees and no president has ever used so many, maybe Trump might catch up soon.
Milei rules through his iron circle (in reality a triangle) who are tasked to implement his libertarian ideas and neoliberal economics. However he also needs the PRO and Macri is the president of that party. The triangle consists of himself and the two people he trusts; his sister Karina and an external consultant with extreme fascist tendencies, Santiago Caputo. Santi is the son of Macri’s business partner also of the Caputo clan (with the minister for economics Toto Caputo), Nicolás Caputo. Nicolas and Mauricio founded Mirgor (a company that has been given some exclusivity in local cellphone markets from import tariffs). Mirgor assembles cellphones in Tierra del Fuego. Milei attacked their exclusivity just this week, leading to strikes in the country’s most southern province. This circle have eliminated the separation of powers in Argentina. The third power, the judiciary, has been broken by previous presidents (including Macri) who also has cases pending against him but the corrupt Peronists don’t trust the law either. Argentine presidents generally evade legal problems. The Supreme Court is a joke with none of its members with previous experience as judges. With the legal branch removed from power the legislature remains important (even if it is tamed by Milei’s emergency decrees). Now Milei has more regional power in the Capital and in various other provinces where Milei also did well that same day.
On the day of the election Mauricio Macri held what he called a “traditional” press conference in the Café Tortoni on Avenida de Mayo, a local tourist attraction. Mauricio sat with his cousin Jorge Macri (considered the nation’s second most powerful man) along with their election candidate Silvia Lospennato who also called foul the LLA dirty tactics. The Macri’s denounced a modern day fraud committed by the Libertarians where Mauricio’s Artificial Intelligence avatar (so realistic that it was impossible to differentiate from the man himself) appeared on a video telling his voters that there was a last minute change of plans and that the PRO candidate had stepped down instructing them instead to vote for the LLA candidate Adorni. When Macri was president he had his own troll army constantly attacking his political opponents but he had never stooped so low himself as to impersonate a competitor then ask for their voters.
These dirty election techniques may mean the end of Milei’s powerful alliance with Mauricio Macri’s PRO (Propuesta Republicana) a neoliberal fiscally conservative yet socially liberal party. The situation is not unlike the former alliance of the Reform UK and the Tory Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, the far right in Argentina is eating the conservative’s lunch but making space for social democrats. In Britain this led to a labour government in Argentina’s capital this is not the case.
The message was entirely false (a deep fake video) shared by Santiago Caputo and various Milei trolls. Macri, not a man to unmask his emotions especially against right wing political forces, seemed angry. Milei’s candidate, Adorni did win, just, 30% to 27% (for Santoro) and just 15% for Lospennatto. Macri will try to prosecute the deep fake video in the courts but the incident will be long forgotten by the October elections. The feud between the PRO and the LLA parties may get worse in the run up to the mid term elections (an election that will really matter to national power). Alternatively they may fuse or pull the PRO to the extreme right (as happened with the conservative party in the UK) which led to Tory destruction.
In the end he most striking result of the election was that nearly 50% risked fines by not voting at all. The irrelevance of political forces (all political forces) was the big winner. Of those legally able to vote just 53% did so. Of these their top three candidates were Adorni: 487,000= 15.7%, Santoro: 442,000= 14.3% and the PRO’s Lospennato getting 257,861 votes and 8,34%. in the end the PRO party and Milei have the same corporate sponsors who don’t really care who is in power so long as they are not nationalist and definitely not socialists. The socialist front scored less than 4%.
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