Javier Milei’s midterm sweep

The roar inside a Buenos Aires hotel ballroom Sunday night sounded like a country exhaling—then choosing to hold its breath a little longer. Against forecasts that had darkened in recent weeks, President Javier Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, swept Argentina’s midterm legislative elections with roughly 41% of the national vote and a haul of new seats big enough to shield his vetoes and turbo-charge his shock-therapy agenda.

In the president’s telling, Argentina had reached a “tipping point”; in the numbers, a movement that upended the political map less than two years after his outsider rise. Markets, which had braced for turbulence, instead found relief. And in Washington, a congratulatory note from President Donald Trump underscored how much this vote had become a proxy for Argentina’s bold—and polarizing—economic experiment.

Milei basked in the glare of television lights and the chant of supporters, declaring that Argentines had chosen “continuity of change” over what he derided as a return to the past. His team’s political craftsmanship showed: after a bruising setback just weeks earlier in Buenos Aires Province, the government flipped the nation’s largest battleground and stitched together wins across much of the country.

“We crossed the hinge,” he told allies, language that captured both the drama of the evening and the governing opportunities ahead, starting with a push to lock in labor-market changes, a tighter fiscal stance and deregulation measures that have defined his first 22 months.

The stakes were enormous. Argentines were renewing 127 of 257 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 24 of 72 in the Senate, numbers that would decide whether Milei’s veto pen could be overridden and whether his emergency decrees could be bottled up by the opposition. Turnout hovered near 68%, low by recent standards for a country with compulsory voting, and the election also debuted a new, standardized paper ballot system nationwide, a modest but meaningful procedural modernization after decades of provincial variations.

In effect, the ballot tested whether Milei’s “chainsaw” cuts had produced enough visible gains to outweigh the social pain. On the night, the answer was yes.

The most symbolic prize was Buenos Aires Province, the Peronist heartland that had dealt Milei a heavy defeat in September. This time his slate edged the peronist coalition in a photo-finish that reverberated well beyond the pampas. Flipping the province did more than add seats; it broke a psychological hold and suggested that the government’s message of “fear the old crisis more than today’s austerity” resonated with enough swing voters to erase a double-digit gap in less than two months. That reversal, paired with strong showings in Córdoba, Santa Fe and Mendoza, reframed Milei’s coalition from a noisy insurgency into a machine capable of grinding out establishment-level totals in vote-rich districts.

Nationally, the governing party’s tally translated into roughly 64 new seats in the lower house, a surge that gives Milei and his allies the defensive mathematics to prevent veto overrides while forcing the opposition to reckon with a president strengthened rather than chastened at midterm. He still lacks a supermajority, and any attempt to rewrite the economic rulebook will require alliances with centrist blocs and pragmatic provincial leaders. But the parliamentary math has shifted enough to let him set the pace—especially if he can institutionalize pacts with center-right lawmakers who’ve often voted with him bill by bill.

Financial markets took the message before dawn. Analysts who had warned of a sell-off if the vote went sideways instead spoke of a relief bid, with Argentine assets poised to rally as investors recalibrated the odds that Milei’s program would endure. The broader story line—fiscal surplus for the first time in more than a decade, monthly inflation slowing dramatically, and a government bent on deregulation—suddenly looked less like a sugar high and more like policy with staying power. Early notes from Wall Street and the City of London pointed to a bid for bonds and for the Argentina ETF, a sign that political risk premia might compress as the reform timeline lengthens.

Yet the international subplot may be even more consequential. The United States has tied material financial lifelines to the credibility of Milei’s overhaul—a $20-billion currency swap line already inked and a proposed facility that could double that headline number if reforms stay on track. Trump’s public embrace of the result, and his administration’s message that future support depends on congressional backing for Milei, add an unusually explicit, geopolitical layer to a domestic midterm. Argentina’s relationship with Washington, and its attempt to firewall the economy from currency panics, now runs through Congress as much as through the Casa Rosada and the Treasury.

For now, the macro scoreboard is Milei’s best campaign poster. Monthly inflation, which spiked above 12% when he took office, has been coaxed down near 2%—still high on a global scale, but a tectonic shift for a country once synonymous with triple-digit price surges. The government claims a fiscal balance that was fantasy in the recent past, achieved through subsidy cuts and a ruthless pruning of public outlays. The social cost is real: unemployment has ticked higher, public-sector unions have seethed, and poverty indicators remain severe. But this election suggests that enough voters will endure the present in exchange for a plausible promise of stability—so long as the glide path, however jagged, continues downward on prices.

The opposition, meanwhile, confronts a strategic cul-de-sac. Peronism, rebranded under the “Fuerza Patria” banner in much of the country, remains a sizable force, with provincial machines, a deep bench of mayors and union allies. But Sunday’s map showed a coalition struggling to articulate an alternative that doesn’t read as a restoration of the old order. In the Senate, where Peronists have traditionally punched above their weight, the party’s floor eroded to its weakest in years. The movement’s most visible standard-bearers, including Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof, signaled that they would press Milei hard on distributional questions while insisting that the government must now own the consequences of its program.

What comes next is the work of politics. The government’s to-do list is long: an overhaul of labor rules to encourage formal hiring; a rewrite of pension indexation; a second wave of deregulation aimed at unlocking investment in energy, transport and logistics; and a fiscal framework that binds today’s discipline beyond a single term. None of this can be done by decree. Milei, often combative in tone, will need what he promised on Sunday night: “basic agreements” across the aisle, including with the center-right Republican Proposal (PRO) and governors who, whatever their party label, ultimately trade in jobs and works budgets. The midterm has given him leverage; it has not given him omnipotence.

There are constraints. Dollarization, once a campaign promise, has already drifted from the government’s near-term horizon; technocrats fret that reserves, debt maturities and the real economy’s fragility leave little room for radical monetary moves. On trade, the next chapter with Mercosur and the European Union will test whether a liberalizing impulse can coexist with the domestic politics of painful adjustment. And in the streets, where Argentina’s politics are made as much as in the chamber, unions and social movements are unlikely to holster their pressure, even if Congress is less hospitable terrain for blocking reforms.

Still, Sunday’s vote must be read for what it is: a rare midterm endorsement for a sitting Argentine president, the kind last seen in 2005 under Néstor Kirchner and in 2017 under Mauricio Macri. It does not erase the scars of the past two years, nor does it guarantee that the hardest part of Milei’s program—the part that touches inefficiencies protected by decades of custom—will pass intact. But it resets the political calendar. The second half of this presidency will be judged on execution, not just diagnosis; on the pain that remains, the jobs that return, and whether inflation’s descent is lasting enough to rebuild the middle class’s faith. In the arithmetic of Argentine crises, those are the only measures that count.

For now, the president who arrived with a chainsaw as his symbol has something subtler in hand: a legislative screwdriver. He can tighten the bolts of a program that, for all its controversy, has delivered milestones that Argentine leaders long promised and rarely achieved. He can also over-tighten, stripping threads and making assembly harder when the next crisis comes. The magic of midterms is that they don’t settle arguments—they set stages. After Sunday, Javier Milei owns the stage. Whether Argentina owns the future he promises will depend on whether this victory becomes a governing pact or just another electoral crest in a country of waves.