Will Milei’s radical course now continue?

Elections in Argentina

Will Milei’s radical course now continue?

Argentina is facing turbulent parliamentary elections. Milei’s political future and his government’s controversial course could be put to the test.

On Sunday, half of the mandates in the Chamber of Deputies and a third of the mandates in the Senate will be renewed in Argentina. Although no new head of state will be elected, these elections are worth taking a closer look at.

In 2023, libertarian economist Javier Milei surprisingly won the presidential election. For a long time, the man with tousled hair, who filled stadiums during the election campaign with a leather jacket, chainsaw and rock music, was not perceived as serious competition by the established parties.

In the months before the election, he passed the Peronists and the electoral alliance in the center-right camp almost unnoticed. He took office on December 10, 2023 with the promise to put an end to corruption and mismanagement, to fight inflation, to balance the budget deficit through rigorous austerity policies and to return Argentina to its former greatness in keeping with the motto “Make Argentina Great Again”. Since then, the world has looked at the country with interest.

Milei, who took over a run-down country with negative net reserves and high inflation, focused on macroeconomic reforms in his first year in office. He massively cut subsidies, halved the number of ministries and created a deregulation ministry, which later served as a blueprint for the Musk authority in the USA.

Inflation fell from 25.5 percent in December 2023 to 2.2 percent in January 2025, although accompanied by a deep recession in the first nine months of the term. When the economy began to grow again in the last quarter of 2024 and poverty fell slightly, the Argentine economic miracle was celebrated in liberal circles.

The libertarian ruling party La Libertad Avanza (LLA), founded in 2021, only holds 15 percent of the seats in the national Chamber of Deputies and around 10 percent in the Senate. Nevertheless, Milei pushed through his reform policy in the first year, partly by decree and partly with the support of other parties. The president was supported by the high approval ratings among the population, which remained stable at around 55 percent until the beginning of 2025. The opposition remained hesitant, with the center-right camp in particular sharing Milei’s reform course.

In May 2025, LLA achieved a clear victory in the midterm elections in the city of Buenos Aires, but at the expense of the center-right party Propuesta Republicana (PRO), which served as a majority for the ruling party in many legislative proposals at the national level. In a dirty election campaign, a deep fake video was used against the PRO.