Argentine President Javier Milei’s party has won a landslide in midterm elections, with voters confounding doubters by backing his cost-slashing, state-shrinking agenda and deregulation of the economy. The Telegraph has more.

Mr Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party (LLA) rebounded from a series of setbacks to win 40.8% of the congressional votes on Sunday, far outpacing the opposition.

“Today we reached a turning point, today begins the construction of a great Argentina,” the 55 year-old libertarian President told supporters at a victory party in Buenos Aires.

Mr Milei pledged in 2023 to take a “chainsaw” to the state, and has since cut budgets for education, health, pensions and infrastructure.

On Sunday he promised to continue on the reform path with what he predicted would be “the most reformist congress in Argentina’s history”.

US President Donald Trump congratulated his close ally, saying Mr Milei was doing a “wonderful job”.

The elections were the first critical test of Mr Milei’s support since he came into office two years ago. Half of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and one-third of the Senate seats were up for grabs.

The centre-Left Peronist movement, in power for most of the country’s last 80 years, trailed behind with 31.6% of the votes.

The win should allow Mr Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist, to plough on with his radical overhaul of Argentina’s long-troubled economy that centres around free market reforms and deep austerity measures.

It represents an almost doubling of LLA’s existing number of seats in congress, and will provide Mr Milei with a key veto power. However, he will need to forge alliances in Congress with the centre-Right in order to pass legislation.

The run-up to the vote was marked by a run on the national currency, the peso, that forced Milei to seek a bailout from Mr Trump.

In early October, Washington promised an unprecedented $40 billion package of aid – but the assistance was contingent on Argentines supporting Mr Milei in the midterm elections.

“If he wins, we’re staying with him. And if he doesn’t win, we’re gone,” Mr Trump had warned.

The US organised a highly unusual $20 billion (£15 billion) currency swap with Argentina’s central bank, and spent hundreds of millions buying Argentinian pesos to keep it afloat last week.

The peso soared in value straight after the overwhelming victory was announced on Sunday.

Mr Trump, who calls Mr Milei his “favourite President”, said on Monday: “Our confidence in him was justified by the People of Argentina.”

Worth reading in full.

Just three days ago, the Spectator ran an article asking ‘Is it curtains for Milei?‘ which claimed the libertarian’s project was failing and he was headed for a bruising defeat:

Perhaps Milei should be more humble. In recent weeks he borrowed some $20 billion from Donald Trump and the United States to prop up the remnants of his ‘miracle’. Despite being lauded internationally for much of his first two years as President for reining in inflation and delivering a fiscal surplus, the cracks Milei has been papering over have now become chasms. …

The midterms were supposed to be the moment that the good economic management of the past two years would pay off and Liberty Advances, Milei’s party, would storm home victorious and in control. Instead he seems on the brink of disaster. Polling earlier this month found that 64% of the public now disapproves of Milei’s presidency, a mighty fall from earlier this year when he ranked as one of the most popular leaders in the world. …

The truth is that Milei’s brutal austerity and hacking at the state has simply led to thousands of people out of work, industry grinding to a halt and the growing discontent of Argentina’s sizeable middle class. 

That aged well.