Argentina’s president suffers crushing defeat in provincial vote

Argentine President Javier Milei suffered a sweeping setback on Sunday in the Buenos Aires provincial election that was viewed as a barometer for how his libertarian party will perform in crucial congressional midterms next month.

Milei’s recently formed La Libertad Avanza party captured just 34 per cent of the vote in Argentina’s biggest province, losing by a landslide to the left-leaning Peronist opposition, which secured 47 per cent with the majority of ballots counted late on Sunday.

Milei conceded that his right-wing party’s crushing 13-point loss to his populist rivals represented “a clear defeat”.

“If anyone wants to begin rebuilding and moving forward, the first thing they must do is accept the results,” Milei told his grim-faced supporters at the party headquarters. “They were not positive. We suffered a setback, and we must accept it responsibly.”

With Milei’s close associates embroiled by a corruption scandal and struggling to stabilise a misfiring economy ahead of congressional midterm elections in late October, the results were being closely scrutinised for their potential to rattle investors and roil jittery global markets.

While analysts expected La Libertad Avanza to lose by a few points to the Peronists, his allies feared that a worse-than-expected outcome in Buenos Aires province – which makes up nearly 40 per cent of the country’s population – would galvanise his rivals at a critical time.