Milei’s purple patch

Last Sunday’s libertarian victory in the City local midterms and the record low turnout have a common root – both stem from a toxic individualism defining modern times. Rather than launch into purple prose about leonine conquests, this column would like to underline the extreme relativity of the election by pointing out that technically it was a positive result for the ruling PRO centre-right party since they entered the fray with seven City legislators and come out with 10 – even if the big picture says otherwise, of course, with mellow yellow already turning into rust and dust. But ahead of any further interpretations, let us proceed inductively and start with the results of this nationalised contest.

Instead of giving the full details of the 17 lists (supplied further down), they will be subdivided into four broad categories – libertarians (five lists) 35.24 percent, Peronists (three) 29.89 percent, ex-members of the Juntos por el Cambio coalition (four) 28.82 percent and the left (three) 3.87 percent with spoiled ballots accounting for most of the remainder. While the opinion polls gave eight of the 17 lists chances of winning one of the 30 City Legislature seats at stake, only five clinched entry, with seven lists failing to reach one percent – La Libertad Avanza (30.13 percent) 11 seats for a net gain of five, the Peronist Es Ahora Buenos Aires (27.35 percent) 10 seats for a net gain of two, PRO (15.93 percent) five seats for a net gain of three, Volvamos Buenos Aires (8.08 percent) retaining the three seats responding to former two-term City mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and Frente de Izquierda (3.16 percent) holding one of its two seats at stake. Of the 15 communes (all once PRO property), nine went libertarian and the other six Peronist (whose gains came with their leading candidate Leandro Santoro polling five percent less than in his 2023 mayoral campaign).

But perhaps more significant than any of these figures is the 46.8 percent of the electorate who sat this one out, thus virtually halving the above percentages – comparable to Chaco which had its 16-inch deluge of rainfall during the electoral weekend and not beforehand like here. This factor alone might serve to explain why the Kirchnerite victory exploiting the divisions to its right (forecast in virtually every opinion poll) failed to materialise with the turnout well below 45 percent in the traditionally Peronist Commune 8 – although a last-minute swing of the 15 percent undecided was also detected by pundits. But turnout was hardly better in the erstwhile PRO strongholds of Recoleta, Palermo and Belgrano (especially in the first where it was a couple of points below average) and this column would argue that the City Hall candidate Silvia Lospennato lost more ground to the indifference of a posh vote simply not showing up than to switches to the bandwagon of President Javier Milei´s spokesman Manuel Adorni, lured by economic stability. Beyond some neighbourhoods in the communes of Caballito (6), Floresta (10), Villa Devoto (11) and Saavedra (12), no turnout above 60 percent is to be found.

The headlines all reflect a Milei triumph and a PRO catastrophe (the government objectives in almost equal measure), both accurate enough but also relative. The primitive but effective slogan “Adorni es Milei” (blithely excluding any municipal agenda as sought by City Hall) was true enough inasmuch as his 30 percent exactly replicated Milei´s own percentages in all rounds of 2023 voting prior to the alternatives being reduced to Sergio Massa in the run-off – even if the purple vote almost doubled the yellow beyond all expectations. Only four of every seven voters in a low turnout voted for the two leading lists, hardly justifying talk of polarisation (especially with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner nowhere in sight).

As for PRO, the damage had been done beforehand, as suggested by the paradox of their seat gains last Sunday – long before it began to be voiced that City Mayor Jorge Macri’s move from Vicente López to the national capital had raised him to the level of his incompetence, the two 2023 rivals Rodríguez Larreta and current Security Minister Patricia Bullrich (now a card-carrying member of La Libertad Avanza and encouraging defections in that direction) between them had reduced the PRO caucus to a septet, which last Sunday’s debacle now restores to double digits. Nor was Rodríguez Larreta as important a factor in Lospennato’s downfall as generally assumed – his candidacy might have served to divert away from Adorni and Santoro voters who were never going to endorse Jorge Macri anyway. The real losers were the UCR Radicals, not only dropping all three of their seats but even finishing behind the Coalición Cívica, very much their junior partners in the extinct Juntos por el Cambio coalition – UCR party chairman Senator Martín Lousteau now seemingly has nowhere to go come October without even having participated in these elections.

All this does not exhaust the issues (not least that controversial Artificial Intelligence video in which ex-president Mauricio Macri purportedly dismantled the PRO list, urging support for Adorni, or the pre-electoral feelgood announcements by the latter) but the main purpose of today’s column is post-electoral number-crunching with the impact of last Sunday´s vote to be followed later.

Time to record the also-rans and minor details of this election, which will vanish from sight in subsequent columns. The five lists landing seats have already been named while five more candidates topped one percent – the libertarian maverick and 2023 mayoral candidate Ramiro Marra on 2.62 percent, Paula Oliveto championing clean government with Coalición Cívica on 2.5 percent, Lucille Levy pitching for the student vote of some half a million with Evolución (Radical) on 2.31 percent, Alejandro Kim of Korean origin for Guillermo Moreno’s ultra-Peronist Principios & Valores on 2.03 percent and the loquacious Ricardo Caruso Lombardi (representing MID, a member of the ruling national coalition) on 1.67 percent. Their distance from a seat can be measured from the last man to enter for La Libertad Avanza (LLA) obtaining a quotient of 2.74 percent.

Trailing far behind were Yamil Santoro (Union Porteña Libertaria) on 0.62 percent just scraping a five-digit vote, former Cabinet chief Juan Manuel Medina for Seamos Libres (picket Peronism) on 0.51 percent, Federico Winokur of the far leftist Nuevo MAS on 0.38 percent, Eva Koutsovitis for Confluencia (representing Claudio Lozano’s brand of leftism) on 0.33 percent, the youthful libertarian defector Mila Zurbriggen (El Movimiento/Nueva Generación) on 0.2 percent, César Biondini of the Frente Patriota Federal with neo-Nazi roots on 0.16 percent and Marcelo Peretta of the independent Movimiento Plural on 0.13 percent. Fin, as Adorni might say.

Geographically, Adorni won in the north, west and east of the city and Santoro in the south and centre. Although the latter won only six of the 15 communes, he took a majority of 26 of the 48 barrio neighbourhoods. While the hitherto rampant PRO failed to win a single neighbourhood, Lospennato could only top 20 percent in Retiro, Puerto Madero, Recoleta, Belgrano and Palermo, which were also the only places where she managed to be runner-up, always well behind Adorni. Rodríguez Larreta failed to reach double digits anywhere.

Having described above the distribution of the 30 seats at stake, where does this leave the next City Legislature? The fact that the three main lists all gained at the expense of lesser forces in some ways makes for a less fragmented legislature but also more complex for City Mayor Jorge Macri with no majority possible without either the eternal Kirchnerite foe (20 seats) or an LLA out to get him (13 seats). The fragments of the Juntos por el Cambio coalition triumphing in 2023 command barely a third of seats – PRO (10), the Radicals and Rodríguez Larreta (five each) and Coalición Cívica (one) – with two leftists and four others.

But having said all this, the only conclusion is a big win for Milei.