Milei, the Favorite for 2027: Reelection Hinges on Economy and Peronist Infighting

No team wants to start a championship as the favorite. In politics, it’s usually the opposite: a year before the electoral battle, it suits Javier Milei to be the leader with the greatest chances of victory. The president has the opportunity to be, at the same time, the organizer of the political system he wants to continue leading for another four years, but also to design the terms of competition in his favor.

The lack of neutrality of those in power is a common sign in all countries, and it is especially accepted as a norm in Argentina, where the Constitution granted the president privileges in the name of governability. Milei has a double-edged advantage: he will be judged by his economic achievements, and his opponents will fuel their chances with the consequences of those decisions made from the presidency.

The outcome of the hypothetical two-round presidential elections next year has already begun to take shape. Those who did not vote for him in 2023 or support him in the midterm vote last year are unlikely to now surrender to the libertarian offer. One third that could approach 40 percent of the votes has a name: Peronism. Milei does not have much chance to directly intervene in shaping the opposition’s offering, but he has already started working to ensure his main adversary cannot present itself united. Without intending to, Cristina Kirchner and Axel Kicillof are collaborating with him through a fissure in Kirchnerism that could become a split.

Milei cannot count on that fragmentation as he does not control it, and everything could end in an agreement at the end of the growing tugs-of-war between the imprisoned former president and the governor of Buenos Aires. However, there is another Peronism, subjected for two decades to Cristina’s relentless hegemony, on which the libertarian president can operate. It is the projection of work that the ruling party is carrying out to mitigate the legislative orphanhood with which it began.

In that trade-off between the need for parliamentary support and the urgency of provinces to have a line of aid from the central government, Milei managed to pass decisive laws at the beginning of 2024 and 2026. Last year, the libertarians got distracted building their own party strength in the provinces and paid the price when their allies coalesced to vote against their interests, such as laws on university funding and assistance for the disabled.

Borgesian without knowing it, the governors with Milei are united not by love but by the fear of not being able to administer their fiefdoms. It is not ideology; it is needs that can be solved by exchanging favors. Milei has a recent experience that he can understand through the same collaborators around him that Mauricio Macri had during his presidency. It was when these same governors of various stripes (non-K Peronists, provincial parties, and radicals) exchanged favors. In the end, Macri favored the idea of not formalizing an agreement to bring them all under the same electoral roof, and many of those partners ended up contributing to Alberto Fernández’s candidacy.

This week, Milei again surrounded himself with 13 governors, almost the same group, with two exceptions, that attended the inauguration of Chief of Staff Diego Santilli. The president has more time than the governors, most of whom decided to play their continuity in the first half of next year. They are already campaigning, starting to adjust all their apparatuses to avoid risks. And of all concerns, the main one is having the president as an enemy today.

In that game of deception and insinuations that Milei says he detests but actually practices, only five governors know that the president will put a candidate to beat them: Kicillof, Gildo Insfrán (Formosa), Sergio Ziliotto (La Pampa), Ricardo Quintela (La Rioja), and Gustavo Melella (Tierra del Fuego). With the rest, in several cases there are agreements of full convergence and other various formulas above and below the surface that include not presenting libertarian candidates or putting several libertarian candidates to lose. The counterpart is more or less explicit support for reelection or, at a minimum, not building or supporting any other presidential candidate.

All that and much more happens and will happen in the caste, the name Milei gave to the political system before he began to command it. There is another element, perhaps more important than the agreements between leaders that Karina Milei and Diego Santilli deal with. Milei will win or lose due to the harsh transformation of the economy that began with public accounts to adjust fiscal variables and, as a result, reduce inflation. Understood by millions of Argentines as a drastic cut of populist decay, this sharp change of course operates simultaneously on the country’s reality: the shrinking of each person’s wallet, expressed in the phrase «I can’t make ends meet.»

It is also the beginning of a strong restructuring of the protectionist economic system that shelters work but at the same time buries and removes horizons of genuine development for the country. This dual transition—the delay in recovering personal income and the negative effects of a necessary productive transformation—are two elements that condition Milei. In the president’s favor is that he currently has more support than anyone, although what he has is not yet a guarantee of reelection. More importantly, no one has yet emerged as an alternative that is not similar to the worst of the same that the country decided to leave behind in 2023. For now, Milei is lucky that there is no one to represent the pains caused by the transformation he is executing. He has more tools than anyone to avoid it.

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