In late October Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, won a decisive victory in the country’s midterm elections. The scale of the result caught most political commentators off-guard. It now gives the president the legislative capacity to push through his much touted programme of labour and tax reforms.
While voter turnout hit a historic low, those who did vote overwhelmingly supported Milei’s Liberty Advances party, strengthening his chances of consolidating his radical economic agenda of austerity and free-market capitalism.
Milei’s defeat in local legislative elections in Buenos Aires province only a month earlier had led me to ask whether his economic agenda was at risk of being derailed. But this time around, in the same province – a traditional stronghold of the opposition Peronist party – Milei’s party took most of the seats.
