MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

A year from the presidential vote, Argentina's parties begin to define alliances

With little more than a year to go before Argentina's presidential elections of October 2027, the governing party and the main opposition force began this week to realign their positions. La Libertad Avanza, the party of President Javier Milei, resumed talks with former president Mauricio Macri's PRO, while the various currents of Peronism agreed a truce aimed at blocking the electoral reform the government is promoting.

Macri and the general secretary of the presidency, Karina Milei, held a telephone conversation of around thirty minutes on Monday, their first in more than nine months. On Thursday, delegates from both forces met for two hours at the Casa Rosada: Cristian Ritondo and Fernando de Andreis for PRO, and Cabinet Chief Diego Santilli together with lawmakers Martín and Eduardo Menem for the government.

The outcome was the creation of a joint political table that will meet every two weeks, and a statement in which both sides said they shared “the conviction that Argentina cannot fall back into the hands of populism.” There is as yet no national electoral alliance. Macri has said PRO will field its own candidate in 2027 and is already promoting former economy minister Hernán Lacunza. Convergence appears strongest in Buenos Aires province.

Karina Milei has a hand in drawing up electoral lists, which gives weight to her role in the negotiations. The governing party is also holding talks with governors in around ten provinces. La Libertad Avanza won the presidency in 2023 without a single provincial governorship, an unprecedented situation in Argentine history.

The main territorial contest of 2027 will be Buenos Aires province, the country's most populous, governed by the Peronist Axel Kicillof. La Libertad Avanza opened on Thursday the premises that will serve as the base for its provincial campaign, and one of its provincial figures, Sebastián Pareja, pointed to Santilli as the likely candidate to face Kicillof.

On the opposition side, Kicillof, lawmaker Máximo Kirchner and former presidential candidate Sergio Massa met for three hours on Wednesday. They agreed to defend the open, simultaneous and compulsory primaries known as PASO, which the government seeks to scrap alongside changes to party financing. The mechanism allows all parties to settle their candidacies on the same polling day; without it, Peronism would lose the tool it uses to resolve internal divisions, and building an opposition alliance would become harder.

Participants in the meeting warned, according to the newspaper Página 12, that those backing the removal of the primaries would have to answer for making Milei's continuity easier. The message was aimed at Peronist governors of northern provinces who tend to side with the government in Congress.

According to the latest Opinaia survey, 55% of Argentines would vote for Milei or would consider doing so, seventeen points above those who would lean towards a Kirchnerist candidate.