A plaza in Cordoba, Argentina on October 22. The country's President Javier Milei has garnered support and a promise of financial aid from the Trump Administration. Photo / Anita Pouchard Serra, The New York Times
After securing billion-dollar commitments from the United States, President Javier Milei of Argentina returned home to his voters.
Wearing a leather jacket and holding a megaphone on the back of a pick-up truck, Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist economist and former firebrand pundit, rode through crowds of students, farmers and pensioners.
He pleaded with them to support him in a pivotal midterm legislative election today - his toughest test yet.
“I’m asking you to stand with us,” Milei told an audience wearing Lionel Messi soccer jerseys and red Maga caps last Wednesday in Cordoba, the country’s second-largest city. “We’re at a turning point in Argentina’s history.”
The election gained outsized attention after US President Donald Trump endorsed Milei, a like-minded ally, and warned that a US$20 billion ($35b) lifeline he has promised to Argentina depends on the vote’s outcome.
The election is also seen by economists and the financial markets as a test of Milei’s bold experiment to try to jump-start a chronically unstable economy.
Yet for all the high-stakes international attention on the election, the final verdict belongs to Argentine voters, who have the first chance to grade Milei since he was elected president in 2023.
Milei needs a strong showing in the midterms to gain enough support in Congress to pursue his agenda, but how well his party will perform remains uncertain.
Around the country, optimism about Milei’s cost-cutting programme and relief over Argentina’s slowing inflation has mixed with fatigue from the austerity measures, stalling growth, job losses, and corruption scandals.
Even in the central province of Cordoba, a conservative stronghold, Milei’s electoral success now seems in doubt.
On the street where Milei held his rally, shopkeepers have closed stores as sales plunged.
Retirees say they can no longer afford their medications, doctors and university professors have held strikes to protest against decreased funding, and factory workers gather outside closed plants.
“We voted for him and now I am sitting here with no work and no money,” said Diego Gomez, 43, a chemical-plant worker who said he was laid off this year in Rio Tercero, a town in Cordoba province.
Sitting on plastic chairs and drinking mate outside the chemical factory, several workers said they had trusted Milei’s vow to take a chainsaw to Argentina’s sclerotic and often corrupt political establishment, which has overseen decades of economic turmoil.
Recent bribery scandals involving some of the President’s closest allies have left them believing that Milei was not actually crushing the elite.
“He blew up the working class,” Gomez said.
Milei is pleading with voters to be patient, promising that his economic project will eventually pay off, particularly now that the US is offering assistance.
The Trump Administration has pledged to provide Argentina with a US$20b currency swap and American investors are weighing whether to lend an additional US$20b.
After securing such a generous package from the world’s richest country, earning his voters’ patience seems an even higher hurdle for Milei.
“I know you don’t make a generational change in a year,” said Dario Maldonado, who also lost his job at the chemical plant and voted for Milei in 2023. “If everything wasn’t so bad, if everything wasn’t so dire, I would give him more time.”
A few dozen kilometres of dirt roads south of Río Tercero, where giant lizards strolled, pensioners walked to a community centre in Villa Maria for free medical check-ups.
Most pensioners in the town receive the equivalent of about US$250 a month, which is around the national poverty line.
Life was never easy for them, but they said Milei made things worse by failing to increase pensions as medicine costs and other prices soared.
“I am very worried about food,” said Graciela Nanez, 64, a pensioner who said she struggles to give her grandchildren yoghurt or rent clothes for their school graduations.
Nanez said she had voted for Milei. “I was angry,” she said.
“I don’t understand much about politics, but I saw the misery in Argentina, I saw the poor who kept getting poorer and the rich who kept getting richer and I thought it was the old government’s fault.
“But,now people are disillusioned again. They are desperate.”
Jose Ruben Torres, 72, another pensioner, said he used to buy tickets to watch his local soccer team, the Alumni. These days, unable to afford tickets, he stands on the footpath outside the stadium, trying to catch glimpses of games from behind a fence.
Milei’s efforts to reduce inflation, from an annual rate of 160% when he took office to around 30% now, has helped decrease the poverty rate by 10 percentage points, to 32%.
Experts say the middle class has borne the brunt of his austerity programme with sharp increases in utility bills, school fees, and healthcare costs, forcing many households to scale back their spending.
Pablo Heredia, 44, who owns a chain of men’s clothing stores, said he had closed one branch and was likely to shut another as sales plummeted.
“We were used to going out to dinner, going on holiday. Now I straight up don’t have any money,” Heredia said.
Sales had also plunged in a store selling baby gear across the street in downtown Cordoba.
The 25-year-old shopkeeper, Milena Torres, said her support for Milei had not waned.
“Things are very tough, but I believe and hope that things will be better in the future,” she said.
That is a sentiment Milei is hoping many other voters embrace.
“I never said it was going to be easy,” he shouted into a megaphone amid a crush of people elbowing to shake his hand.
Milei has argued that his economic overhaul, including reducing the size of the government, budget cuts and deregulation measures, is laying the groundwork for new investment and future prosperity once Argentina regains credibility with global markets after decades of high spending, defaults, and bailouts.
Many Argentines say they still trust him to fulfil his promises.
“I want to keep trying,” said Jose Luis Acevedo, a real estate developer, as he sat by the pool of an apartment complex he was building in Cordoba.
He said his business was operating at a loss, but he was prepared to weather the challenges for a more stable financial climate that could sustain a mortgage market — which is virtually non-existent in Argentina.
“I’d rather endure a few years of difficulty with the hope and the goal of reaching a time when our currency is sound.”
Inflation has plagued Argentina on and off for decades, and its effects were visible around Cordoba.
The farmlands around the city were dotted with 60m-long plastic tubes where many farmers stored their harvest because they regarded their crops a safer financial deposit than keeping pesos, the local currency, in bank accounts.
“I don’t want to go back to what we had before,” said Rafael Cueto, 53, a soy farmer.
For many, going back meant predicting what shoe size children were going to be and buying them before prices rose, or stocking up on litres of milk.
Moira Minue, a Milei supporter at his rally, said she could now buy toys on Amazon after the President lifted some import restrictions.
Nearby, Jose Orta, held an Argentine flag, but it included the words “No colony”, a reference to criticism among some Argentines that Milei was selling out Argentina’s sovereignty to the US in exchange for financial support.
Some of the President’s supporters did not think that was a bad idea.
“We want to be a capitalist, right-wing country,” Rosa Ortelli, a teacher who works with the blind, said at Milei’s rally. “And if the US wants to buy us, that’s great.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Emma Bubola and Daniel Politi
Photographs by: Anita Pouchard Serra
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