It is still premature to talk about candidacies or make electoral forecasts. There is more than a year left until the election, and Argentine politics has shown its ability to surprise. However, with the information available today, a scenario of strong polarization between La Libertad Avanza and Kirchnerism seems to be taking shape. If a relevant “third force” does not emerge, Argentines will have to decide whether to deepen the economic transformation process initiated at the end of 2023 or return to a model that, for decades, led to stagnation, inflation, and decline.
It is worth starting with a clarification. Supporting the economic course does not imply claiming that the government did everything right. Like any process of deep transformation, Javier Milei's management was accompanied by political and economic errors. Some were the result of the inexperience typical of a force coming to power for the first time; others, of the imperfect nature of any management. What matters is not the absence of errors, but the speed and skill with which they are corrected.
But one thing is to demand as citizens that economic policy be perfected, and quite another is to abandon the course to return to the same recipes that have failed time and again. Javier Milei came to the Presidency with the economic mandate to stabilize an economy that was on the brink of collapse.
Two and a half years from that starting point, the landscape is substantially different. Mentioning all the advances would be impossible in a single opinion column. It suffices to mention a few: the primary fiscal surplus has ceased to be an exception to become a rule, the Central Bank has begun a deep cleaning of its balance sheet, inflation - with its ups and downs - has decreased much faster than expected, credit has returned, foreign trade has normalized, there has been no more shortages, and strategic sectors such as agriculture, mining, and oil have regained incentives to invest and expand. No variable better summarizes the regime change than the drop in country risk, from 1,920 to 437 basis points.
Perhaps the government's greatest achievement cannot be summarized in an economic indicator. The real change was altering long-term expectations. For years, companies and families made decisions thinking about how to survive the next crisis. Today, slowly, the possibility of planning, investing, and producing with a longer horizon is re-emerging. This normalization, although still incomplete, constitutes one of the most important assets that Argentina could receive in 2027.
That does not mean that the task is finished. It would be a mistake to present economic policy as a finished model. In the monetary-exchange realm, traits of the previous regime, which aimed to be left behind, still persist: exchange restrictions that still limit the free movement of capital, a clamp for legal entities, and a discretionary monetary policy that is highly dependent on the Ministry of Economy. Although Javier Milei came to power proposing to close the Central Bank, at a minimum, he should move towards an independent monetary authority, with clear rules and free of discretion. It is a pending debt.
