Since Jorge Bergoglio became Pope Francis in March 2013, Argentina has been stuck in a structural recession, flirted with hyperinflation and developed a crippling political polarisation. It has had to sign three consecutive agreements with the International Monetary Fund – the latest on April 11 – to refinance an unpayable foreign debt. Bergoglio, as Pope, decided not to return home, despite making 47 trips outside Italy during his time leading the Catholic Church. He became the only non-Italian Pope to not visit his homeland during his reign. Today, as he instructed, he will be buried in Rome, not Buenos Aires.
The reason why Pope Francis avoided Argentina is that he was too Argentine, all the way through until the end of his life. He could never avoid getting subtly involved in local politics, normally through isolated public messages that required complex interpretation. Ultimately, he could never rise above the “crack” that grips domestic affairs. The phrase “la grieta,” used to define the country’s deep political divide, was coined by the late journalist Jorge Lanata at an awards ceremony in August 2013, five months after Bergoglio’s ascension. It has only gotten worse since then.
Argentines have badly needed moral guidance during the last dozen years. The lack of it led to the election of a political outsider and maverick, Javier Milei, in 2023, a decade after Pope Francis left the country, never to return. Voting for the person who had said, three years earlier, that the Pope was “the representative of the Evil One on Earth,” was a gesture of anger and desperation by a public frustrated by a bad economy and a fruitless political rift. Argentina electing Milei, just as an Argentine was running the Vatican on a unifying message, is as if John Paul II had seen his Polish compatriots vote for a version of Joseph Stalin, rather than Lech Wałęsa.
Milei’s arrival to power was just the latest and most overwhelming example that, while he rose to become a moral icon of progressive causes and tolerance as Catholic leader, Pope Francis not only failed to advance but witnessed the degradation of that same agenda in his homeland. Argentina’s top political leaders barely speak to one another and there is next to no consensus around the course the country should take — except for a few exceptions like the Vaca Muerta shale development or mining in the Andes Mountains, issues Francis’s environmental activism would have cautioned against.
During Francis’ time as pontiff, in 2020, Argentina also passed a historic bill to legalise abortion, something the Catholic Church strongly opposed. In fact, anti-abortion is practically the only policy issue the Milei administration can claim as common ground with the late Pope – even though the President’s party is unlikely to have enough strength in Congress to overturn the law. Conversely, the Pope’s focus on social justice is exactly what the Milei administration believes has been wrong with the country’s economic order for the past century — social justice continues to be the raison d'être of Milei’s sworn enemies, the Peronists, who are still led (though not without internal divisions) by former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
Bergoglio’s death will not change that — on the contrary. Milei and Fernández de Kirchner, unsurprisingly, are not on speaking terms and the country’s upcoming political and legal debate will be focused on whether the former president will be banned from running for public office again if her six-year prison sentence for corruption in the management of public works during her 2007–2015 governments is confirmed by the Supreme Court. The case is undergoing final review by the nation’s highest tribunal, which could eject her from politics with the stroke of its three members’ pens in mere seconds. If that doesn’t happen, the Milei administration and its anti-Peronist allies are hoping to advance the “Ficha Limpia/Clean Slate” bill, which only needs a final Senate nod to block her from running by law. In any of those scenarios, la grieta will only widen.
As protocol dictated, Pope Francis met all of Argentina’s most recent presidents during his time in Rome: Fernández de Kirchner (on seven occasions, not just in Rome), Mauricio Macri and Alberto Fernández (twice each) and Milei too, despite his past verbal outbursts. But he could not instill in them the legacy the world now praises him for and, willingly or unconsciously, he got carried away by their bitter divisions. In doing so, Bergoglio unintentionally failed the Argentine people, who, in the difficult years of his papacy, only grew angrier — and ended up voting from the dark side of their souls.
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