President Javier Milei may have defined 2025 as the year of national reconstruction, but over the last four decades in Argentina every odd number has been an election year regardless of the government and now is no exception. In the absence of any immediate crisis with blue skies and black ink on the economic front and with no mega-crime distracting the public attention (horrific although the Córdoba infanticides were), the focus has already been electoral speculation in this first full week of 2025 even if the national campaign only officially begins on June 4 (August 27, if the PASO primaries are eliminated). President Milei’s main initiative this week has been to refloat an electoral agreement with PRO ex-president Mauricio Macri “to obliterate Kirchnerism” (against a backdrop of libertarian trolls circulating an absurd claim that the Macri administration’s tax authorities protected Kirchnerite tycoons).
That proposal is entirely consistent with a campaign strategy of seeking polarisation against Kirchnerism in a replica of the run-off which brought Milei to the Casa Rosada – even if his government flourished last year from the extreme fragmentation of the political spectrum – and most pundits assume this polarisation to be the name of the game. While so much could happen in the country and the world in the next nine months, everything now points to the midterms going Milei’s way even if it will be a relative victory at best with 178 of the total 329 Congress seats not at stake (leaving him with 80-100 of the 257 deputies and 15-20 of the 72 senators according to the various scenarios). And not just because this is almost unanimously forecast to be a year of economic growth – the tendency has been for each presidency since the return of democracy (Raúl Alfonsín in 1985, Carlos Menem in 1991, Néstor Kirchner in 2005 and Macri in 2017) to win its maiden midterms.
Apart from the two least successful presidents of this period (Fernando de la Rúa and Alberto Fernández), the main exception to this rule has been a likely leading protagonist in the upcoming midterms – former two-term president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner – and this forms the starting-point for an analysis which begs to differ from the prevailing picture of polarisation crowding everybody else out. In the 2005 midterms Néstor Kirchner successfully cannibalised his predecessor and sponsor Eduardo Duhalde just as Milei is now poised to do with the allied PRO centre-right vote. But in the following 2009 and 2013 midterms, Francisco de Narváez and Sergio Massa successively came out of almost nowhere as dissident third-party candidates to defeat the government, due to the vehemence of Kirchnerism (grain export duties in 2008 and the “democratisation of justice” drive to crush court independence in 2013) estranging many Peronists. While deemed “condemned to success” this year, could Milei’s vehemence result in a similar phenomenon sooner or later, leading to a winning combo neither libertarian nor Kirchnerite being created out of seemingly nothing?
Although Milei and Fernández de Kirchner seem to be leaving everybody else invisible, a despised middle ground has its potential ingredients. Milei is playing a dangerous game in estranging a Vice-President Victoria Villarruel with greater appeal to his supporters among the ‘círculo rojo’ (“red circle”) establishment and among nationalists (including right-wing Peronists) when the libertarian lion is already anticipating servility to United States president-elect Donald Trump. Former two-term Buenos Aires City mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta has long been exiled to the political wilderness but his 2023 PASO vote of 11 percent at a time when so clearly not the flavour of the month in either the country or his party shows that his centrist line of thinking represents a significant portion of the electorate. While the Radicals have never really recovered all century from their loss of power in 2001, they retain a nationwide presence and govern five provinces – nor are these the only governors offering third-party alternatives. A list of all the bits and pieces would exceed this space with the apolitical outnumbering them all but together they add up to half the electorate not firmly committed to either La Libertad Avanza or Kirchnerism.
Nor are the blocs of either Milei or Fernández de Kirchner as single-minded as their leaders. Quite apart from Villarruel, the libertarian administration’s volatility with its high turnover of officials is notorious while Kirchnerism is solidly behind the letter “K” but cannot decide for whom it stands – the Kirchner dynasty or Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof. In any event early days would be the understatement of the year were it not so young.
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