Patricia Bullrich, the candidate for Argentina’s centre-right pro-business opposition coalition, received an unsurprisingly warm welcome from a private sector summit in the seaside resort of Mar del Plata.
“[Argentina’s] problem is a jammed up, colonised, cornered state,” she told the audience on Thursday, pledging to undo populist policies and high spending by the ruling centre-left Peronist movement. “We have the conviction, and I have the temperament, to carry out the changes Argentina needs.”
But a mile away, at a closed-door lunch dubbed a “counter-summit” by Argentine media, a more radical change was being pitched by hard-right outsider candidate Javier Milei, who declined to attend the bigger conference. Speaking to around 100 executives, the libertarian economist explained his plan to dollarise Argentina’s economy and “take a chainsaw” to the state.
Milei has emerged as the frontrunner for Argentina’s elections since he unexpectedly scored a narrow victory in a crucial August primary vote. His Libertad Avanza party won 29.9 per cent of the vote, while Bullrich’s Juntos por el Cambio (JxC) scored 28 per cent and the Peronists 27.3 per cent.
Before that result, JxC had looked like a government in waiting — the beneficiaries of Argentina’s worst economic crisis in two decades, which has driven annual inflation above 124 per cent, and the poverty rate above 40 per cent. Pledges to correct the Peronists’ economic mismanagement had Bullrich’s coalition topping almost every poll.
But Milei is now wooing voters and dominating the news cycle. While pre-election polls are often unreliable indicators, if they were borne out at the first round on October 22 Bullrich would be eliminated and Milei would advance to a run-off against Sergio Massa, the Peronist economy minister who has announced billions of dollars worth of pre-election cash handouts.
Bullrich, a no-nonsense former security minister, is seen as one of Peronism’s fiercest opponents. Her problem, according to Lucas Romero, director of Buenos Aires-based consultancy Synopsis, is the depth of anger about Argentina’s chronic economic dysfunction, which JxC failed to resolve when it ruled in the four years to 2019 under president Mauricio Macri.
“Argentines feel that frustration when you’ve been working on a computer and it freezes, and none of the buttons you push get it going again,” he said. “Eventually you say to hell with it and press restart — even if you risk losing something.”
Bullrich hopes to convince voters that JxC has the institutional support that Milei, a one-term congressman with a flimsy nationwide party structure, cannot rely on to deliver lasting change.
“She will offer a deep change, but a viable change,” said Alberto Fohrig, political adviser to the JxC candidate. “We have the seats in congress, the governors, the teams . . . and 600 people working on proposals.”
The policies include a strong dose of economic orthodoxy. Bullrich promises to remove Argentina’s strict currency controls, cut spending and roll back barriers for exporters. She has also pledged hardline policies to tackle violent crime and robberies, such as lowering the age at which Argentines can face criminal charges to 14, and a crackdown on road-blocking protests by campaigning groups.
The clash between Bullrich, a competent career politician, and Milei, an eccentric former television personality, echoes the 2016 US presidential battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, said Adriana Amado, a political analyst.
“Her challenge isn’t really her character, it’s that she’s competing when Argentines are feeling unprotected [by the political establishment]. And then you have this charismatic leader promising to save them.”
Milei’s irascible persona — even many supporters refer to him as “crazy” — appears to have struck a chord with frustrated Argentines. Libertad Avanza’s successful social media strategy has also enthused young voters.
In speeches, Bullrich sometimes errs into a stiff monotone, and analysts said JxC, which includes both rightwing and centre-left politicians, had struggled to articulate a message as clear as Milei’s.
She is also not an expert on the economy, and dodged a technical question from Milei during a presidential television debate last week. To compensate, she has announced Carlos Melconian, a plain-speaking and respected conservative economist, as her future minister.
Bullrich does not lack personality. She projects the image of a tough, determined militant.
As a middle-class teenager and twenty-something in the 1970s, Argentine media say she participated in operations by the leftist guerrilla group the Montoneros — though she says she only joined a “Peronist youth” organisation —and was arrested by the military dictatorship. Later, having shifted to the right, she became known for taking on union leaders and Peronists in television debates.
This election has put Bullrich, a natural hardliner, in an “awkward position” as the middle way between Milei and Massa, said Juan Germano, director of polling group Isonomia. She faces a dilemma of how to court Milei’s voters without losing centrist Argentines to Massa, who represents Peronism’s moderate wing.
For most of the campaign period this year, Bullrich avoided direct attacks on Milei. But she has recently changed tack. After Milei held an event with a union leader who has worked closely with the Peronists, she has repeatedly accused him of being a “fraud” who cosies up to the “political elite” he condemns.
Milei, who has often justified state terrorism by Argentina’s military dictatorship as a “war” against leftist guerrillas, last week falsely accused Bullrich of “putting bombs in kindergarten” in the 1970s.
On Wednesday, she filed a libel lawsuit against him. The next day, she announced a plan to “compensate the civil and military victims” of the Montoneros on the “first day” of her presidency.
Isonomia’s research suggests many Argentines decided their primary vote just before that election. That volatility means Bullrich could still make it to the second round, pollsters said.
Germano said Argentine polls “have been good at picking up a very strong demand for change, and a sense of anger”. The question is whether the anger that drove voting in the primary will dissipate. If it remains, he added, “then Milei will keep going up”.
Read the full article here
