Progressive Sergio Massa and ultra-liberal Javier Miley will face each other in a runoff, in the dispute over Casa Rosada. Progressive Al-Biruni Sergio Massa He leads the presidential vote with 36.1%, followed by extreme liberals Javier Miley By 30.3%. Conservative Patricia Bullrich (Jxc) trails by more than 23%.

Argentina will then return to voting on November 19. More than 35 million citizens were called to the polls on Sunday (mandatory voting) to choose the next president from among five candidates in the elections. No one could win the first round. The performance of Massa, the candidate of the Union for the Fatherland coalition, was better than expected, while Mili, the candidate of the Advanced Freedom Party, did not achieve the expected success.

Even if it doesn’t break through, anarcho-capitalist Miley, who upended Argentina’s political map by waving chainsaws at marches against the “parasitic class,” He was the undisputed hero of Election Day, Argentina’s star in search of a miracle or the antithesis of 21st-century Evita. “We can create the best government in history,” affirmed the La Libertad Avanza candidate, who is accompanied to the polling station by his sister Karina (“the president,” he says). Hundreds of people were waiting for him on Sunday morning at the Technological University of Buenos Aires, where he received a rock star welcome. With throws of red roses, hands reaching out to touch him, Hysterical tears and a police cordon to curb the public’s enthusiasm. Who sang: “Se siente, se siente, Milei Presidente.”

They will have to wait, Peronism is not ready to give up. Sergio Massa, the son of Italian immigrants, got a better result than previous expectations, especially in the main province of Buenos Aires, where Peronist governor Axel Kicilloff was also re-elected. “Whoever governs will have the enormous task of solving many problems,” warned the UFP candidate at the time of the vote, who knows the issue well as the current economy minister: inflation is 138%, the middle class is free. 4 out of every 10 Argentines fall below the poverty line. His journey was full of thorns, not roses. He had to distance himself from President Alberto Fernández, who is leaving with an approval rating of less than 15%; By Representative Cristina Kirchner, convicted of corruption, And with an economic crisis that he was unable to tame. Whatever happens, he reassured himself, awaiting the results: “On Monday, Argentina will still be there.” The “hawkish candidate” Patricia Bullrich, a member of the right-wing coalition “Juntos Por el Cambio” and former Minister of Security, who until the end had hoped to return, was excluded from the electoral race.

Now the duel will become close. On paper, the Liberal is the favorite in the run-off, but on Sunday night, at the Peronist party headquarters (Fernandez and Kirchner absent), there was an air of recovery. It will be necessary to see whether the libertarian populist will in fact be able to retain protest votes, but also win the votes of the liberal right and radicals, or whether the fear of jumping into the void he represents will eventually come to an end and his radical proposals will no longer be stronger. Forty years after the end of the military dictatorship, many analysts wonder whether democracy is in danger, or more simply, whether the “anti-system” Miley will follow in the footsteps of Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. Unlike previous presidents, Argentina’s “libertarian” populist does not have solid political power to support him, even if opinion polls predict that Libertad Avanza will rise in these elections from two deputies (Mili and his deputy) to at least 41 deputies. As a result of an impoverished and disillusioned nation, neither the Peronist left nor the traditional right, which alternated in power, could provide answers. The king of talk shows and TikTok, who despises China and denies the climate crisis, appealed to young people and frustration by calling socialists “poop” and promising to “dollarize” the economy — against the advice of the International Monetary Fund, which owes Argentina $44 billion — And “dynamite” for the central bank. Whether he will be able to govern, if elected, remains a mystery.