Argentina voted this Sunday and, when these lines reach the reader, the final results may not yet be known. The legislative elections are presented as elections that take place two years after the presidential elections. A new president is not chosen, but renews half of the Chamber of Deputies and a third of the Senate.
These are, therefore, elections that will have functioned more like an endurance test than an electoral event. The country not only elects representatives, but the continuity or halt of the most audacious economic experiment in its recent history.
President Javier Milei has attempted in just ten months what many have not dared to do in decades. His government reduced public spending, eliminated subsidies, liberalized prices and pursued fiscal balance with an orthodoxy that Argentina had forgotten.
Inflation, which reached crazy levels in 2024, fell with unexpected speed. In May 2025 it marked the lowest level in several years and the interannual rate fell from around 300 percent to high double digits.
The public deficit also turned around. In January, Argentina registered its first financial surplus in more than a decade and had several months of positive balance.
What Milei has gained in macroeconomic discipline he has lost in political capital
In parallel, foreign trade closed 2024 with a surplus close to 19 billion dollars. Fiscal credibility, although fragile, once again was a variable that can be talked about in the present tense.
However, accounting fundamentals do not always translate into well-being. The country is going through a technical recession, consumption has contracted and poverty has visibly grown. The reforms have bought time, but not consensus. What Milei has gained in macroeconomic discipline he has lost in political capital.
Although the IMF projects growth of between five and five and a half percent for 2025, its own reports admit that inflation remains at levels that double the initial objective and that the improvement in reserves depends on a favorable international environment. Stabilization exists, but It still doesn’t stand on its own.
Social peace has not arrived. In the best of cases, the country lives a conditional truce. The middle and lower classes endure the adjustment, while the unions, the provinces and the opposition test the limits of patience. If the resulting Congress does not grant a stable majority to the ruling party, the government will be forced to negotiate each reform, law by law, in a slow and exhausting process.
If, on the contrary, Milei manages to expand its parliamentary base, it will be able to advance towards the second phase of its plan, which involves strengthening the opening of the market, strengthening reserves and consolidating a price system less dependent on state intervention.
Milei has shown that a chronically inflationary country can, at least for a time, stabilize its prices and balance its accounts.
The Argentine economy moves between two pulses that cancel each other out. On the one hand, fiscal discipline has restored a sense of order that investors value.
On the other hand, The social urgency threatens to dismantle that discipline at the first sign of unpopularity. The Peronist opposition, reorganized under the Fuerza Patria front, represents this reflection of resistance.
The new bloc, articulated by the Justicialista Party, La Cámpora, the Frente Renovador and other allies, has been promoted by Massa, Kicillof and Máximo Kirchner, and has returned to Buenos Aires Peronism the ability to act as a counterweight. Its strategy is known: invoking fear of adjustment and presenting itself as a refuge from the erosion of liberalism.
The economic result is ambiguous. Milei has shown that a chronically inflationary country can, at least for a time, stabilize its prices and balance its accounts. But Argentine society, accustomed to the pendulum of spending and subsidies, is barely beginning to assimilate the cost of that stability.
If policy forces a change of course before the equilibrium matures, the economy will return to its usual sequence of inflation, controls, deficits and devaluation. If, on the other hand, the adjustment is maintained and the social consensus does not explode, the country could enter a stage of uncomfortable, although more predictable, growth, which would be no small feat for a country that has lived for too long on the brink of collapse.
For the European observer, Argentina is a reminder that no economy resists fiscal populism indefinitely. Milei has shown that order can be profitable, but not free. The risk is that social impatience and the strategy of fear that progressivism exploits destroy what has been achieved before it can be consolidated.
If that happens, Argentina will once again teach us the same thing as always: that in economics it is not enough to promise discipline, we must sustain it when it hurts.