Argentina!

By Mary Williams Walsh

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Any presidential election that features a leading candidate wielding a chainsaw demands further explanation. Below, News Items managing editor Mary Williams Walsh explains what happened in Argentina. I’ve read a great deal about the Argentine election in the past few weeks. I haven’t read anything as good as this.

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Was it really such a shocker when Argentina’s Peronist minister of the economy, Sergio Massa, sailed past his anarcho-capitalist rival Javier Milei in Round One of their country’s election cycle on Sunday?

Global investors seemed to think so. Argentina’s benchmark dollar-denominated bond fell to 22 cents on the dollar on Monday. And some of Milei’s youthful supporters in Argentina said they were shocked too. Polls had led them to expect a Round One victory for their hero, and instead they got a runoff.

“It feels wrong. All the polls were indicating Milei would win,” said a 28-year-old named Guilherme, who stood apart from the chanting, drum-beating, post-election crowds in downtown Buenos Aires Sunday evening. “They’ve stolen our votes. They own the system, so maybe we just can’t win. Maybe it’s impossible.”

But maybe not. Massa the Peronist and and Milei the youth-friendly firebrand will duke it out in a runoff on November 19.

Argentina’s economy is a shambles, with inflation at 138 percent and rising and the central bank’s reserves all but depleted. Milei has campaigned on the idea that if the economy is this bad, the economy minister must be to blame. He calls for a radical overhaul: replacing the Argentine peso with the US dollar, “dynamiting” the central bank, closing ten ministries, privatizing state enterprises. He brings a chainsaw to rallies, to show what he’ll deal with government spending. His iconoclastic vision rocketed him from next-to-nowhere into first place in a preliminary vote in August.