With close to 90% of provisional votes counted in Argentina’s presidential elections today, Libertarian extremist Javier Milei of the Freedom Advances party (LLA) defeated Finance Minister Sergio Massa of the ruling Union for the Fatherland (UxP) coalition. Even before all the provisional votes were counted Massa conceded defeat, as Milei was shown to have 56% of the vote to Massa’s 44%. Crucial to his victory was the overwhelmingly favorable vote in seven of the country’s interior provinces, and a poorer than expected performance for Massa in the all-important province of Buenos Aires, home to 37% of the nation’s electorate.
Unfortunately, Milei’s victory is also one for ultra-corrupt London and Wall Street favorite, former President Mauricio Macri, who took over Milei’s campaign after his poor performance in the Oct. 22 elections and has been running the show since then. Macri hopes to install his own neoliberal cronies in Milei’s cabinet and has apparently gotten him to backtrack on some of his more extreme proposals, such as dollarization and shutting the Central Bank. But he is otherwise committed to Argentina’s destruction as a sovereign nation-state.
Sources in Buenos Aires point out that the election result represents a harsh condemnation of the government of Alberto Fernández, who failed to follow through on any of the promises he made to rebuild the economy after Macri’s disastrous IMF government (2015-2019), making constant concessions to IMF dictates. For Massa to win, since he is also Fernández’s Economics Minister, both he and the government needed to sharply reverse course on concessions to the IMF, and immediately launch a physical-economic recovery program in conjunction with China and the BRICS. The Schiller Institute laid that out in detail on Sept. 4 in its Emergency Program To Save Argentina. Neither Massa nor Fernández heeded this policy advice.
