A Historic Defeat for Populism, but With A Warning
Argentina’s midterm elections show a historic loss for Peronism, but a new, anti-system candidate is on the rise.
A major economic crisis. Rising prices, in everything from food to housing. A disappointing response to the pandemic, with shows of clear disregard of the COVID-19 guidelines (such as the first lady’s birthday party in the middle of a nationwide lockdown)
A populist leader pontificating on television, claiming he didn’t lose an election he was clearly beaten in.
Does this sound familiar?
Yesterday, Argentina’s ruling Peronist coalition took a historic beating in the country’s midterm election, which renewed half the seats in Congress and 1/3 of the Senate. For the first time in 38 years, Peronists lost the Senate. For the first time in the history of the movement, there’s another political force of equal weight, the Juntos coalition that governed the country between 2015 and 2019, that’s able to compete against Peronism for the popular vote and not fall apart after its first electoral defeat.
But at the same time, a new type of populist movement is surging: the libertarian, far-right movement of economist Javier Miley got 17% of the vote in the Autonomous City of Buenos…
