Peronism is still alive. In the end, the outgoing Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, managed to stem the populist wave that seemed to have to win hands down the first round of the presidential elections in Argentina, with the ultra-liberal candidate Javier Milei. It didn't happen that way. Everything will be decided in the ballot on November 19th, but at this point it will be the candidate from the broad center-left who presents himself as frontrunner, strong with around 36% obtained yesterday, better than the 30% of Milei who will therefore be the challenger in the second round and the 24% of the candidate of the moderate right Patricia Bullrich. If mathematics is not an opinion, therefore, Massa will still need a feat in a month's time, considering that if all the votes for Bullrich were to converge on Milei, the latter would be the one to win. But it is not certain that it will go like this, on the contrary: yesterday's vote shows that Argentine voters have sensed the danger of a populist drift, which also seemed practically certain according to the polls on the eve of the day, which gave Milei even close to 40%.
Yet the day had not started very well for the Peronists: first a bomb threat at the Casa Rosada, seat of the presidency, then the turnout figure at a 40-year low (74%, and in Argentina voting is compulsory) which had foreshadowed, as often happens, a sound defeat for the centre-left. But already immediately after the closing of the polls, while tension was rising in Milei's committee between illnesses and insults to journalists, a certain optimism began to emerge in Massa's bunker, which was later confirmed by the definitive data. The – provisional – victory of the current Minister of Economy, advocate of austerity in the midst of a economic crisis unprecedented, with inflation at 138% in September, the poverty rate and the exchange rate with the dollar above 1.000 pesos on the parallel market (the most used one), also demonstrates that a moderate proposal, if not even a "third way" as they define it in South America, is still able to provide answers to voters.
In fact, the radical left lost in this round, while the right, adding the votes of the two candidates, also did very well, theoretically exceeding 50% of the votes. In the end, for the Peronists, the choice of former president Cristina Kirchner paid to step aside, taking into account the fact that a conviction for corruption hangs over her, and also to discard the re-nomination of the very unpopular president Alberto Fernandez, or even to opt for a candidate from the "harder and purer" wing of the coalition Union for the Homeland. Massa is in fact a man of the establishment, with a centrist orientation and no longer so close to Cristina Kirchner, of whom he was also head of cabinet between 2008 and 2009, after having been mayor of Tigre. In this round, incidentally, there was also voting for the governor of Buenos Aires, and the outgoing Axel Kicillof, also a Peronist and former Minister of Economy in 2013-2015, was confirmed, again with Cristina as president. His result was significant, because he drove Peronism into the decisive province of the capital.
While waiting for the November 19th ballot between Massa and Milei, all attention is now on market reaction. In the pre-election period the trend of the Buenos Aires stock market was bullish, however dragged by speculation: in reality, the hawk Milei doesn't even convince the financial community international, who are above all interested in Argentina being able to honor the monstrous debt it has with the IMF and quickly returning to the path of growth and monetary stability. Before the vote, however, the exchange rate with the dollar, due to fears of the total "dollarization" proposed by Milei, skyrocketed to the highest ever and the everyday economy, that is, simply the availability of goods on the supermarket shelves, has in fact stopped waiting to see more clearly after the outcome of the vote.
