Multilevel analysis of Argentine populism in the 2019 elections

Abstract

In the 2019 Argentine elections, the political dispute proved to be polarized between the Peronist Argentina of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and the new Argentina of Cambiemos, which was inaugurated in 2015 by Mauricio Macri. Both forces were configured under a radical appeal to a faithful electorate, anchored in a populist discourse that, on the one hand, reinforced the figure of their leaders as the only ones capable of finding the regenerative path in the face of the crisis, and, on the other, showed their opponent as a political mistake with no future. In this paper, the logic of the populist phenomenon can be observed, in territorial terms, in two itineraries: 1) on the horizontal axis or within a subnational unit; 2) on the vertical axis, in which the national populist distinction spills over into the provincial dynamics. Thus, we will look at the first itinerary in light of the separate gubernatorial elections; and the second itinerary in the unified elections for nation and province.