Argentina’s Election Shows Voters Are Still Mad as Hell
The race for Argentina’s presidency was neck-and-neck, the polls suggested. But when it came down to it, a beleaguered electorate backed the change candidate in droves.
In overwhelmingly voting for Javier Milei yesterday, Argentines not only delivered a snub to Economy Minister Sergio Massa, holder of the incumbent Peronist party torch who oversaw the crisis that has left the public shouldering one of the world’s most punishing inflation rates.
They put their hopes in a libertarian radical and political novice whose solutions to the South American nation’s malaise are untested and may prove unworkable.
Milei’s policy proposals are as drastic as they are striking: ditching the peso for the US dollar; closing the central bank; taking an axe — or in Milei’s case, a chainsaw — to public spending; shunning Brazil and China, Argentina’s two biggest trading partners.
Yet the signal from a wearied public is unmistakable — anything is preferable to the current torture.
It’s a message we’ve heard before, from the UK’s decision to quit the European Union to Chile’s election of a student activist as its youngest-ever president, as voters shrugged off establishment warnings of disaster in favor of pursuing extreme paths, even at the risk of harming their own interests.
That kind of blow-it-all-up approach to democracy is worth bearing in mind as the world heads into the busiest electoral calendar in at least a decade next year, book-ended by votes in Taiwan in January and the US in November, with former President Donald Trump threatening to return to the White House.
Those elections take place with a bleak economic outlook, contributing to widespread voter volatility.
That means pricing in unexpected political outcomes — even if at face value they appear to make little sense.
For if Argentina shows us anything, it’s that the taste for electoral upheaval is undiminished. — Alan Crawford