Argentina’s President Javier Milei and US President Donald Trump at February 2025 CPAC conference. [Photo: ar.usembassy.gov]

Argentina’s fascistic President Javier Milei scored a surprise victory in the country’s October 26 mid-term elections, held amid deepening social, economic and political crises at home and escalating US imperialist aggression across Latin America.

Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), gained seats and obtained over 40 percent of the vote nationally across both houses, while the nominal “opposition,” the Peronist coalition Fuerza Patria, and its allies, secured around 30 percent of the vote. LLA won in most provinces, including Buenos Aires Province, which historically has been a Peronist stronghold.

The elections renewed 127 seats in the Chamber of Deputies (about half of the lower house) and 24 in the Senate (a third of the upper house). LLA increased its hold from six to 19 senators and from 37 to 93 deputies, thus securing a one-third blocking minority in the Chamber of Deputies (86 seats needed out of 257). This would allow Milei to sustain his presidential vetoes against opposition legislation, which cannot be overruled without a two-thirds majority in Congress.

The Fuerza Patria coalition saw a slight reduction in its representation in the Chamber of Deputies, reducing its number of seats from 98 to 96 deputies, and a more significant decrease in the Senate, from 30 seats to 22 seats.

While the outcome is being touted in the media as an endorsement of Milei’s economic agenda of harsh austerity—symbolized by his wielding a chainsaw—the mid-terms saw the lowest turnout (67 percent) since the fall of the dictatorship in 1983. In other words, one-third of the electorate did not go to the polls, which is a legal obligation in Argentina. In the contests for the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, approximately 59.3 percent and 57.8 percent of the vote, respectively, went to parties other than the LLA.

Prior polling had indicated a tight race between the LLA and Fuerza Patria. Although Milei had won the presidential election in 2023 with a 56 percent majority, his popularity since then has dropped to an all-time low of around 40 percent. Despite monthly inflation stabilization, in his first year of office, the price of public transportation rose 206 percent, housing and utilities soared 276 percent, healthcare increased 184 percent, and education 180 percent. Unemployment rose to 7.9 percent in the first quarter of this year, the highest level in four years, and after Milei took office, the poverty rate rose to its highest level in two decades.

Moreover, LLA is mired in corruption scandals: from a crypto scam involving Milei himself, to allegations of a pay-to-play regime run by Karina Milei, his sister and Secretary-General of the Presidency, to drug allegations against José Luis Espert, a leading legislative candidate for LLA in Buenos Aires Province, who had to suspend his campaign in the first week of October.

Just days before the mid-term elections, Minister of Foreign Affairs Gerardo Werthein and Minister of Justice Mariano Cúneo Libarona resigned, highlighting internal political instability and disputes.

After LLA suffered a loss of about 13 to 14 percentage points to Fuerza Patria in the provincial elections held on September 7 in Buenos Aires, the most populous province of Argentina, concentrating 40 percent of the national electorate and over 30 percent of the country’s GDP, markets panicked, and the value of the peso plummeted. Argentina’s Central Bank was forced to spend $1.1 billion of its foreign currency reserves in just three days to prop up the peso and prevent a collapse, and the United States intervened with a massive $40 billion financial bailout package that includes a $20 billion currency swap and an additional $20 billion in financing from sovereign wealth funds and private banks.

Less than 48 hours before the legislative elections, Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase and former economic adviser to both Barack Obama and Trump, arrived in Argentina amidst ongoing discussions about the broader financial assistance package meant to back the Milei government. JPMorgan Chase was evaluating participation in this credit line of $20 billion. Aside from Milei, ministers and local businessmen, in attendance at the events hosted by Dimon were also war criminals Tony Blair, current head of JPMorgan’s international council, and Condoleezza Rice, a partner of the financial group.

Significantly, Milei’s minister and vice minister of economy and the president and vice-president of Argentina’s Central Bank all made their fortunes working for JPMorgan in New York in the 1990s and early 2000s, helping wring profits out of the immiseration of the working class in Argentina and across the region.

The US aid package constituted more than election interference; it amounted to blackmail. Only 12 days before the vote, US President Donald Trump shamelessly conditioned the bailout on Milei’s victory. “If he loses, we are not going to be generous with Argentina,” Trump declared, amid predictions of the worst economic crisis since 2001. In reality, the bailout will flow directly into the coffers of the major banks and hedge funds, including some of Trump’s closest supporters, while Argentine workers are forced to pay the price.

The Argentine events must be viewed within the context of the Trump regime’s drive to revive the Monroe Doctrine and reclaim Latin America as the “backyard” of US imperialism. This has been expressed most clearly in the extrajudicial murders off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia under the false pretext of combating drug trafficking, together with Trump’s authorization of CIA operations in Venezuela to overthrow the Maduro government and the imposition of sanctions against Colombian president Gustavo Petro for criticizing US aggression.

There are also plans to establish an FBI anti-terrorism center on the triple frontier between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, based on an agreement signed between the US and Paraguay. Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s recent visits to Ecuador and Peru to pitch the deployment of US mercenaries to train local police and military forces are also cause for concern.

On September 29, some days after it became known that Trump would provide a financial lifeline to Milei, bypassing congressional authorization, Milei signed a Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU) authorizing the entry of US military personnel (including Navy Seals) for unprecedented joint exercises at strategic naval bases in the South Atlantic (Mar del Plata, Puerto Belgrano and Ushuaia), called “Operación Tridente,” between October 20 and November 15, overlapping with the elections.

In what has become customary in Latin American countries where fascist forces are on the rise, the nominal “opposition” has focused on making nationalist appeals. The Peronist Mayor of Ushuaia, Walter Vuoto, denounced the military exercises as sacrificing Argentine sovereignty, noting that Ushuaia is strategically important as the “doorway” to Antarctica and for protecting Argentine claims over the Malvinas.

Far from representing a genuine opposition, the Peronists enabled Milei’s rise to come to power and facilitated his agenda. The low voter turnout is an indication of the Argentine working class’s deep disillusionment with the Peronists as they negotiate some of Milei’s most brutal attacks on social institutions and democratic rights and as the Peronist-led union bureaucracies, like the General Labor Federation (CGT), block demands for general strike action.

The lack of an alternative to both Peronism and Milei is mainly the responsibility of the so-called Left and Workers’ Front (FIT-U) coalition. Employing pseudo-leftist and anti-imperialist rhetoric, the FIT-U closed its legislative campaign by holding a rally in front of the US Embassy in Buenos Aires on October 22 to denounce the “colonial pact” between Milei and Trump. Nicolás del Caño of the Morenoite Socialist Workers Party (PTS), a FIT-U deputy for Buenos Aires Province, declared, “We are the only force that will fight not to be just another star on the Yankee flag.”

Prior to the election, the FIT-U held five seats in the Chamber of Deputies, with four of them up for renewal. They were able to retain only three seats in both the City and Province of Buenos Aires, where the FIT-U came in third. The coalition received 851,000 votes, an increase from the last elections, but still far below the 1.3 million it received in the 2021 mid-terms.

The FIT-U ran on a program of reformist policies articulated around making “big business, banks, and landowners pay for the crisis they created” and the need to “invert priorities” and “reorient the economy to the most urgent needs of workers, women, youth, and retirees.”

This nationalist program has nothing to do with mobilizing workers across borders to overthrow the capitalist system—the root cause of exploitation and social inequality—and build a society based on international socialist principles.

The FIT-U’s reformist policies do not meet the urgency of the revolutionary tasks facing the international working class, which confronts the threat of world war and fascist dictatorship, along with relentless attacks on basic democratic and social rights in every country. Their politics are based on promoting illusions in the ability to pressure the Peronist parties and union bureaucracies into fighting Milei and winning concessions for the working class.

The FIT-U does not even label Milei as “fascist” or recognize that fascism is on the rise, limiting themselves to more generic descriptors like “authoritarian” and “ultra-right.” This question is addressed in an opinion piece published in the PTS’s La Izquierda Diario on February 18:

The term “fascism” has gone from being a well-defined political concept to a label that is used for everything, and its use has increased especially since Elon Musk gave a Nazi salute. In this context, figures such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Giorgia Meloni, Nayib Bukele, and Javier Milei have been labeled as fascists. But do these figures really represent fascism? Can we say with certainty that they embody this historical phenomenon? The answer is no.

That this position has not been revised since February—after all that has happened since—is unbelievable! For one, Giorgia Meloni is the leader of the Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, the political successor of Mussolini’s Fascist Party, not to mention Milei’s embrace of the legacy of the fascist-military dictatorship of General Jorge Videla or his ties to Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump, Musk, Bolsonaro and a wide network of fascist figures.

According to the same piece, fascism is an inaccurate label because people can still protest on the streets and anti-fascists can fight with neo-fascists online without restriction. In other words, fascism is only fascism when it’s too late to fight against it.

The FIT-U is disarming the working class by not offering a coherent international socialist perspective and program which would require acknowledging the unresolved questions of the 20th century and drawing the historical parallels between the counterrevolutionary program of the military dictatorships in Latin America and Milei’s program today. These critical tasks must be fulfilled through the building of a new revolutionary leadership in the working class, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.