On October 22, the date of the first round, the current Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, candidate of the center-left coalition Peronist Unión por La Patria, received 36.78% of the votes. And Javier Milei, the leader of the ultra-right La Libertad Avanza, 29.99%. Patrícia Bullrich, head of the list of Juntos por El Cambio, of the traditional right, was removed from the decision and obtained only 23.8% in total. But it is these 23.8% of voters, observers agree, who will decide today’s election.
And who do Bullrich voters vote for? The majority in Milei, especially because the candidate for the Juntos por El Cambio coalition decided to support the leader of the Libertarian Party, even without consulting Maurício Macri, president from 2015 to 2019 and founder of Proposta Republicana (PRO), their party. However, Macri reaffirmed this support shortly afterwards and Bullrich even made a surprise appearance at the last Milei meeting, in Córdoba.
But politics, especially Argentine politics, is far from obeying the rules of arithmetic: Horácio Rodríguez Larreta, influential PRO baron and mayor of Buenos Aires, was defeated by Bullrich in the party’s primaries in August and has already left know that he supports Pasta. And according to the local press, the Ministry of Economy and Foreign Affairs of a possible Peronist government is negotiating.
“Of course whoever voted for Patrícia Bullrich will decide the elections and that she and Macri made an agreement to support Milei”notes Javier Calvo, commentator at the América 24 channel and former director of the newspaper Profilein conversation with DN. ‘But we must take into account, firstly, that she only participated in the elections because she defeated Larreta in her party’s primaries, and secondly, that she led a coalition of parties of which she was in fact the representative of the party would be. rightmost wing of the group.”
“So,” the journalist adds, “the question is what will happen with this internal PRO vote in Larreta – almost 40% of voters preferred him to Bullrich – and what will happen, for example, with the vote of the Radical Civic Union. and the other parties in the Juntos por El Cambio coalition? After all, they are aligned with Bullrich, who supports Milei, but the question is whether they support Massa or will vote blank.’
DN tried to hear the answer directly from residents of Recoleta, the Buenos Aires neighborhood where Bullrich gained the most important vote in all of Argentina. There, 58% of voters chose her, far surpassing the 20% of the mass vote and 18 percent of the vote. % in Miles.
“I voted for Bullrich and I’m voting for Milei because nothing could be worse than what we have,” says Nelly, an economist, who prefers to leave out his last name. “Getting the Mass means transferring the country to the agreement the Peronists made with Brazil. It means turning the country over to communism, to drugs, and turning it into Venezuela.” “Milei is crazy, but there are no crazier people than these Kirchnerist people. They kill those who no longer need them, they want to create more and more poverty and slavery,” he continues as he walks through the Vicente López Park, not far from the house where Jorge Luis Borges, perhaps the greatest figure of Argentine literature, lived.
Clara Bulazos, another Bullrich voter, while walking her dog on Calle Montevideo, says she is not voting for Milei: “I’m voting against Massa, I’m voting against Kirchnerism, we’re tired of it.” “To vote for Milei I obviously have to cover my nose and go into a dark room, but since Macri and Bullrich are now behind him, all the better.”
Most of the people in Clara’s neighborhood will, like her, hold their noses and choose libertarianism. Nelly, on the other hand, fears that many of her relations “who are in doubt” will eventually weaken and “vote for Massa, out of fear of Milei”. “I’m sorry for them,” he concludes.
“The majority of the votes of the traditional right should in fact go to Milei, because it is mainly an anti-Kirchnerist vote, regardless of the rival, although Massa has said that not only is he not a Kirchnerist, but that he will not be . have Cristina Kirchner in his government”, reminds DN Carlos De Angelis, political scientist.
“Mass must, at three or four points in the polls, win back votes in this most productive and exporting central cordon, traditionally more anti-Peronist, which includes the capital and, why not, neighborhoods, such as Recoleta, the middle and upper class . Since Milei had a majority of youth and male votes in the first round and caused many doubts in the higher age category and among women, it is a good sign if he manages to win this useful vote in these segments. “
Javier Calvo concludes: “According to the polls, most of Bullrich’s electorate will vote for Milei in the first round, but will it be 80%, 70%, 60%? Only after the elections will we know.”
While Recoleta, a middle- and upper-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires, is Bullrich’s favorite square in all of Argentina, in La Matanza, a popular suburb of the federal capital, Massa won with just over 50% of the vote best national result. In turn, Milei reached 33%, its record in the country, in Córdoba, a region dependent on agriculture and which in recent years has learned to defeat former President Cristina Kirchner, outgoing President Alberto Fernández and, by extension, Massa detest.
Source: DN
