The End of Peronism?
The End of Peronism?
Cristina Kirchner, who defined Argentine politics for a generation, is banned from holding office.
In the Argentine federal courthouse of Comodoro Py, a judge sentenced Cristina Kirchner, the Peronist strongwoman and former president of Argentina who has dominated the Argentine left for decades, to six years of house arrest. Just two weeks ago, the Argentine Supreme Court upheld her conviction in a corruption case, where it is alleged that she illegally funneled public works contracts to her political ally and family friend Lázaro Báez—a conviction that carries with it not only the six-year prison sentence, but also a lifetime ban on holding political office in the country.
The ruling has, with one motion of the gavel, upended Argentine politics, which was building up to a showdown between the theatrical libertarian President Javier Milei and Kirchnerist Peronism, with the ex-president at the top of the ticket. Kirchner has been a giant of Argentine politics since her husband Néstor Kirchner was elected president in 2003. A skilled politician in her own right, having served as a provincial deputy and a senator, she was a very popular first lady, and when her husband’s term expired in 2007 she replaced him at the top of the ticket. Corruption scandals made little dent on her popularity, and she was reelected in 2011 with immense popular support. The Kirchners were so politically successful that all of modern Peronism is defined in relation to their platform: Her supporters, who espouse a populist, socially progressive welfare-oriented political program, are known as Kirchnerists, and the minority of Peronist dissenters are known as non-Kirchnerists (in Argentine parlance, peronistas no K).
Kirchner’s supporters have responded en masse to her sentence, gathering daily outside of her house in Buenos Aires where she is confined. The court has permitted her to venture out onto the balcony to greet the demonstrators as she attempts to rally the troops and formulate new marching orders for her political movement as they prepare for the upcoming legislative elections this October.
It’s a hard time to be a Peronist these days. The political movement that has dominated Argentina since the end of the Second World War has lost much of its luster, as repeated economic crises have hammered standards of living. The presidency of Alberto Fernández, Cristina Kirchner’s protege, was disastrous. Taking office just as the Covid pandemic swept the world, Fernández opted for an extremely strict lockdown of the country that soon became massively unpopular, especially with the youth. Worse yet, his ill-defined economic program failed catastrophically to deal with Argentina’s endemic monetary crisis, and, by the time he left office in 2023, yearly inflation had surged to 211 percent and threatened to go far higher still.
Leaving the country on the brink of hyperinflation and economic collapse is bad news for any political movement, but Milei’s success at pulling Argentina back from the brink is worse news still for Peronism. Milei’s libertarian platform is as explicitly anti-Peronist as can practically be achieved: anti-protection, anti-union, anti-subsidy, anti-welfare; pro–free trade, pro-deregulation, pro-individualism. A successful Argentine libertarianism is not only an ideological threat to Peronist politics, but it also presents an existential threat to the political, economic, and social modes of organization that have been the fundamental drivers of the Peronist political machine since it was first assembled by Juan Perón in the 1940s.
A difficult beast to classify ideologically—Peronists can be found on the left, right, and center, and Peronist governments have been called everything from fascist to communist-adjacent—the most profound feature of Peronism is its coalition of state-backed organizations for working-class Argentines, such as the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the labor union that served as the backbone of early Peronism. Today the strongest supporters of Peronism are not union workers but public-sector employees, especially teachers and academics. The Peronist economic platform largely consists of handouts to these organizations and their constituents by means of industrial protection, the expansion of state-run industry, subsidies to workers, and the expansion of welfare for the poor and working classes.
These methods worked wonderfully at winning the hearts and votes of Argentines for decades. They have been far less successful at producing a prosperous Argentina. Anticompetitive industrial policy, capital controls, a rigid labor market, and extensive regulatory constraints strangled foreign investment and domestic entrepreneurship, while generous welfare and subsidies to workers rapidly passed the limits of what was possible to achieve with a reasonable budget. This incentivized loose monetary policies that have repeatedly left the country in inflationary crises. Now the project is threatening to come apart entirely.
Milei has been systematically dismantling many of the principal stays of Peronist power. During his presidency, he has dramatically reduced government welfare payments, privatized state-run corporations, reduced university funding, and slashed thousands of jobs in government and government contracting. The result has been a growing economy, less poverty, and a dramatic cooldown of inflation. At the end of May he turned his sights against the unions, signing a decree significantly increasing restrictions on strikes. That order is currently being fought in court, but if it is approved, as it may well be, it would be one more blow against the old engine of Peronism.
Peronist hopes of resistance to the libertarian threat had largely been pinned on their old hero Cristina. She had recently reestablished her control over the Peronist establishment after a brief ouster due to the Fernández administration’s miserable performance. Weeks before her sentence was handed down, she announced that she would be running for a seat in the provincial legislature of Buenos Aires, clearly a strategy to energize her base for the legislative elections and a soft-launch for a presidential face-off against Milei in 2027. Those hopes now lie in ruins.
The most prominent candidate to take up the mantle is Cristina’s son, Máximo Kirchner, founder of the Kirchnerist youth movement La Cámpora and a sitting legislator in the House of Deputies. But Máximo represents the other, much more subtle death knell for Peronism, this time from the left: Argentine left-wing politics, among the youth especially, increasingly resembles the academia-activist complex of modern American progressivism. Even where it shares an economic policy platform, the motive force is no longer the broad-based populist working-class institutions. Instead, it is educated activists. Of course, the unions and the various Peronist auxiliaries have not dissolved, but they can command neither the party nor the popular affection of the Argentine electorate as they did in the past. Their best days are far behind them.
On the other side of the aisle, the right has discovered a genuine response to Peronist national populist attitudes with Milei’s national populist libertarianism, which rejects Peronist premises root and branch—a contrast to decades past when conflicts between left and right often played out entirely within the Peronist paradigm. This approach, too, is popular among the youth, in a way that the former President Mauricio Macri’s stodgier traditional conservatism was not.
It’s still much too early to say how much longer Peronism as a distinctive political movement in Argentina will last, especially given the rapid rearrangement Milei is imposing on the Argentine political landscape. The name will almost certainly continue as a legacy on the Argentine left, even once the final vestiges of Juan Perón’s political machine have long collapsed. But with the sordid end of Kristina Kirchner’s political career, its days seem to number ever fewer.
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