Argentina votes as presidential campaign shows country’s right-wing shift

Argentina has been quietly tilting to the right over the last decade. 

Long gone are the days in which Cristina Kirchner comfortably won the 2011 elections with 54 percent of the vote as part of a left-dominated Peronist coalition, followed by two social-democratic alternatives in second and third.

Recent surveys show that 77% of Argentinians want harsher penalties on crime, 73% think the police should have broader powers, 60% believe private companies should be the country’s main job creators, and only 40% support abortion despite its legalization during the incumbent Alberto Fernández administration.

It’s a significant shift from the days in which Ms. Kirchner dominated the political arena, when Argentinians believed in a strong state, did not think too highly about private business, and would barely blink when the government moved close to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.

Even when Ms. Kirchner’s proxy candidates were occasionally defeated, the winner did so while clarifying he would not slash public spending or push for privatizations, as was the case with former President Mauricio Macri during the campaign trail in 2015.

Ms. Kirchner remains influential within the ruling Peronist coalition — more so than the actual president, Alberto Fernández, despite formally being his second-in-command since they regained power in 2019. But she has also sensed that shift among voters, and responded by anointing centrist Sergio Massa as her candidate in the 2023 presidential election.

The more left-wing alternative within the ruling alliance, Juan Grabois, only got 6 percent of the vote in the primaries, versus Mr. Massa’s 21 percent.

But this wasn’t enough to compete with the two hard-right options: Patricia Bullrich, who beat the more centrist Horacio Rodríguez Larreta in a center-right coalition that combined for 28 percent of the vote, and libertarian economist Javier Milei, an ally of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, who took 30 percent by himself.

The presidential campaign has reflected this shift. 

The center-right had a radically anti-Kirchnerite approach to the election, with Ms. Bullrich running a television ad in which she promised to build a giant maximum-security prison named after Ms. Kirchner, stepping away from the republican values that the coalition always claimed to embody.

An even darker example...